CALIFORNIA NOTES

Engineering at UC Santa Cruz
After 32 years of trying, the University of California's Santa Cruz campus will be getting an engineering school. At its May 15-16 meeting, the UC Board of Regents is expected to approve what has been described as a "focused" school that concentrates on computer and electrical engineering.

Since UC Santa Cruz opened in 1965, chancellors and other administrators have worried that their residential campus in the redwoods had acquired a reputation as a fine place for students interested in the arts or the humanities but not for those inclined toward science or engineering.

Several earlier plans to open an engineering school have been scrapped, for lack of funds or other reasons, but this time it appears the effort will succeed. The plan has been approved by UC statewide officials and by the California Postsecondary Education Commission. The Regents' blessing is expected.

Patrick Mantey, professor of computer engineering and associate dean of the new school, said it will include the already-existing computer science and computer engineering departments, as well as new departments of electrical engineering, applied engineering and applied mathematics.

There are no plans to offer chemical, civil or mechanical engineering, Mantey said, but others pointed out that once a school of engineering has been approved, it may be difficult to limit its offerings.

Twenty-five to 50 undergraduate electrical engineering majors are expected to enroll next fall but eventually the school will have "the full range of UC programs," Mantey said, including bachelor's and master's degrees, Ph.D. programs and research activities.

Some national studies have reported an oversupply of Ph.D.s in almost every area of engineering. For instance, a frequently cited 1995 study by William F. Massy of Stanford University and Charles A. Goldman of RAND found there were 40 percent more people holding doctorates in electrical engineering than there were jobs requiring these degrees.

"That's wrong," Mantey said. "It doesn't fit the world." He said students with doctorates in computer science or engineering are a "hot commodity" and should have no trouble finding jobs. Mantey said he expected strong support for the new school from computer and other high tech firms located in the Silicon Valley.

Warren Fox, director of the California Postsecondary Education Commission, said American universities have veered between producing too many engineering doctorates and not enough.

"There is no good national or state model on supply and demand," Fox said. "The national reports we've looked at indicate there is no reliable predictive model." However, neither Fox nor Mantey could cite national studies that successfully disputed the Massy-Goldman findings

Fox said the commission has sent a letter "concurring" in UC President Richard Atkinson's decision to approve the new school.

But many at Santa Cruz believe the school has been created not to ease a shortage of advanced degrees in engineering but to balance the school's image.

Said one official, "At a recent meeting we were told, 'as a campus, we have suffered from having too many majors who enter low-paying professions. We need more balance.'"

--William Trombley

Endangered Mascot
Alas, the Marbled Murrelet, a small sea bird that lives precariously on the California North Coast, will not become the official mascot of Humboldt State University's athletic teams.

Last month, students at the Arcata school voted 1,218 to 363 to retain an axe-wielding lumberjack as the school symbol, beating back efforts by the environmentally sensitive to switch to the endangered Murrelet.

Too bad. The tiny bird would have made a fine addition to a roster of state mascots that already includes the UC Irvine Anteaters and the UC Santa Cruz Banana Slugs.

--WT

College Rankings
Small liberal arts colleges, including many with a religious emphasis, provide the most added value for undergraduates, Thomas G. Mortenson has concluded in the most recent issue of his Postsecondary Education Report.

Mortenson has examined the expected and actual graduation rates at more than 1,100 colleges and universities, to try to determine how much a student benefits from attending a particular school.

In the resulting rankings, small liberal arts institutions with high percentages of full-time students living on campus do well but large research universities do not.

For instance, Sacred Heart University, a 5,000-student school in Fairfield, Connecticut, is ranked first, while the University of North Carolina, at number 83, is the highest-rated research university. The University of Virginia is close behind, ranked 85th.

Among the 54 California institutions in the Mortenson rankings, Azusa Pacific University rated the highest, number 36. The highest-ranking public campus was Cal State Fresno, at number 103. Of the University of California campuses, UC Riverside scored highest, at number 144, while UC Berkeley was number 242 and UCLA was number 309.

Some of the state's prestigious private campuses also fared poorly. Stanford was number 423, the University of Southern California number 547, Mills College number 695.

"It has always seemed to me that a place like Harvard or Yale or Stanford ought to graduate almost every student it admits because it gets very good students," Mortenson said in a telephone interview from his office in Iowa City, Iowa. "What I would like to see is more information about the value added" by different kinds of institutions.

Mortenson described his rankings, which he acknowledged are controversial, as "a tiny step toward that kind of goal."

He believes the information will be useful to students and those who are paying college bills. "College has become very expensive and it should be viewed by consumers as an investment," Mortenson said. "But most consumers don't have enough good information to make intelligent investment decisions."

To determine the rankings, Mortenson first created a "predicted institutional graduation rate" for each of the 1,106 schools. He calculated this by combining SAT (Scholastic Assessment Test) scores with the percentage of students who attend part-time and the percentage who live on campus. To come up with the rankings, he compared predicted graduation rates with the actual rates.

"As a rough cut, those institutions whose actual institutional graduation rates are ten percent or more above where they are predicted to be are probably doing a good job of supporting the students they admit," Mortenson wrote in the report. There are 160 such colleges and universities.

At the other end of the scale are 177 schools whose actual graduation rates fall ten percent or more below the predicted rates and "appear to be having trouble supporting the students they enroll."

Mortenson emphasized that the rankings attempt to measure only the "value added" of a given school, not the quality or reputation of its programs.

After Azusa Pacific, the California institutions that rank highest on the Mortenson list are Santa Clara University, Cal State Fresno, Loyola Marymount University, Pacific Union College (a Seventh Day Adventist school in Napa County) and UC Riverside.

Those near the bottom of the ratings include Pacific Christian College (in Fullerton), Holy Names College (Oakland), Chapman University (Orange), Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and Cal Tech.

Richard Felix, president of Azusa Pacific University, in eastern Los Angeles County, said the school's "service learning" programs probably contributed to its high ranking.

Felix said the university, which was founded by the Society of Friends, offers 150 courses that include some kind of community service. Each year 60 juniors and seniors spend ten days in wilderness areas, to develop leadership skills, while another group of 60 works with poor people and AIDS patients in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco.

"We are trying to get our students out of the Ivory Tower and out on the streets," Felix said. "We're trying to produce students who are ready to lead, ready to serve."

Nationally, all but one of the first 20 schools are small liberal arts institutions, some with religious affiliations. The lone exception is Albany State University in Albany, Georgia, which was ranked fourth.

Famous universities like Brown, Duke, Northwestern, Princeton and Yale appear well down on the list.

--WT

UC Whistle Blower
The seasonal "Let Sleeping Dogs Lie" award goes to University of California Regent Charles Soderquist for reinvigorating Charles Schwartz, an emeritus professor of physics at UC Berkeley and a sharp critic of the university's budget policies and practices.

In more than 20 reports published in recent years, Schwartz has accused the university of overpaying its administrators and medical school faculty members while raising student fees, among other charges. Schwartz also has voiced these criticisms at regents' meetings.

Lately, the attacks have attracted little attention from the news media but apparently they have gotten under the skin of Soderquist, a UC Davis graduate who has been a "regent in waiting" for almost a year and will become a voting board member July 1.

In a March 9 letter to Professor Schwartz, Soderquist wrote, "Unless you can explain to me how the 'public service' mission of the University is met by your 'reports,' I request that you stop using University envelopes (and paper, postage, computers, desks, electricity etc.) in their preparation and dissemination."

Schwartz promptly circulated the letter among the 500 or so people who receive his budget commentaries. So far he has received about 50 e-mail responses, mostly supporting the professor and attacking the regent.

Schwartz claims the Soderquist letter constitutes a serious breach of academic freedom and also violates the state's "whistle-blower" law. Not much is likely to come of these complaints but they have prompted articles in the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Jose Mercury News.

At this point, Regent Soderquist probably wishes he had kept his own university "envelopes, paper and postage" in the drawer.

--WT