Cal Poly received a record 34,173 applications for the 2007-08 school year, an 11 percent increase from 2006.
This is the 13th year in a row that Cal Poly has had a record number of applicants.
Since 1993, Cal Poly’s application pool has tripled, and has increased 60 percent since 2000.
Much of this increase is due to the faculty’s commitment of building relationships with prospective students, said James Maraviglia, assistant vice president for admission recruitment and financial aid.
“Our goal here is to build relationships with our different constituencies by linking the campus community to them long before they begin an application process,” Maraviglia said. “I think part of it is our ability to build relationships with students later on in the ninth or 10th grade. Here, our dean and our department chairs send our prospective students e-mail messages.”
Cal Poly uses a VIP portal and integrated communication messages to drive applicant interests. Prospective students can create a personal VIP page on the Cal Poly Web site to receive additional information about the university. Cal Poly also uses text messages and broadcasts phone messages to communicate with prospective students, Maraviglia said.
“Our integrated communication allows the entire campus to communicate with prospective students,” Maraviglia said. “We typically have almost 300,000 prospective students in our database.”
The California State University system has also seen a large increase in applications for fall 2007.
This year, the CSU system received approximately 465,742 online applications, which resulted in a record 6 percent increase.
Paul Browning, spokesman for the CSU system, said they work to provide additional outreach to inform parents and students about the CSU application process.
“We put together a poster called ‘How to get to college,’ and we sent it all over the place. This poster outlines what you need to do to be eligible for CSU or to go to a CSU campus,” Browning said. “We also have an event called Super Sunday, where we go to African-American churches and talk about what CSU offers.”
Browning recommends prospective students use the online resource, CSUMentor at www.CSUMentor.edu.
“It tells you everything you need to know,” Browning said. “It goes beyond the application process and works as a counselor in a way.”
The CSU system also works with the Parent Institute for Quality Education to provide parents with classes on college education in California, Browning said.
“We do a lot of things like that to try and get people more interested in going to college,” Browning said. “We welcome more students all the time. We want to bring our enrollment up. More money comes to us when we have more students and we always try to increase enrollment at our campuses.”
Even with the increase in applications, Maraviglia said Cal Poly will have the space to accept more students in fall 2007 then they had this year. He said they will continue to accept exceptional students.
“I think students applying to CSU and students applying to Cal Poly are very different,” Maraviglia said. “It is a totally different type of environment then it is to other CSU campuses. It is a totally different type of student applying here. Being admitted to Cal Poly is definitely a privilege.”