Click here for a printable version of President Armstrong's letter.
To the Campus Community:
I am writing to share a number of important updates with you. As you may have heard during my Fall Convocation address, there are many reasons to be optimistic about Cal Poly’s future. However, realizing our full potential requires us to take some important actions today.
Campus Fees
I have long advocated that improving our financial aid and scholarship programs is essential to fulfilling our ambitious student success goals. Currently, we are more expensive for low-income California students than UC campuses, after adjusting for financial aid and scholarships. This prevents many high-achieving, low-income students from choosing to enroll at Cal Poly. This is not a sustainable situation, and it requires action. We have a responsibility as a public university to act to become more accessible to all Californians. In addition, we must enhance our ability to recruit and retain faculty and staff, and strengthen our overall financial stability as an institution.
Given these needs, we will be initiating a shared-governance process through the Campus Fee Advisory Committee (CFAC) to review and significantly revise our campus fee structure for new students starting Fall 2022. Additional information will be provided following review by CFAC, the Academic Senate Budget and Long-Range Planning Committee and ASI leadership.
The positive impacts of this additional funding would be experienced by all students and colleges while increasing the diversity of the student body and improving the quality of their Learn by Doing education.
Information provided in the future will also detail the relationship of this proposal to Cal Poly Scholars and the Cal Poly Opportunity Fee. For a report on this program, please select this link.
Quarters to Semesters
On a different but equally important topic, many of you are aware that almost a decade ago the CSU Chancellor’s Office asked all quarter-calendar campuses to transition to a semester calendar. Today, Cal Poly is the last CSU campus remaining on a quarter system.
Chancellor Castro has informed me that he expects the university to transition to semesters by the 2025-26 academic year. The communication below from the chancellor details the rationale and provides direction for Cal Poly.
The chancellor outlines three primary reasons why a semester-based calendar will be beneficial to our students. First, a semester calendar will better allow us to address some important articulation and equity issues; second, it will enhance student success in several areas, such as summer internship start and end dates and study abroad; and third, we can achieve greater administrative efficiency both locally at Cal Poly and more widely as part of the CSU system.
I believe Chancellor Castro raises valid points regarding the benefits of adopting semesters. I share his concern about Cal Poly being perceived – rightly or wrongly – as needing to address issues of equitable access and student success. In addition to the considerations he raises, I see this as an opportunity to: achieve greater pedagogical depth in courses at all levels; retain some fast-paced courses by having terms of variable lengths, as we do during summer; rethink how to balance teaching and research for faculty; and revisit curricular priorities across the curriculum.
For all of those reasons, I support the chancellor’s requirement that Cal Poly begin the process of adopting a semester-based calendar.
Transfer Students
As part of our effort to serve the people of California, I am also announcing that we are beginning an effort to enhance Cal Poly’s accessibility to transfer students. I have every confidence that we can expand opportunities to a broader spectrum of qualified students while continuing our tradition of excellence, our focus on student success and our emphasis on Learn by Doing.
Executive Vice President and Provost Cynthia Jackson-Elmoore, Interim Vice President Terrance Harris and our academic deans will lead this initiative, which will include an enhanced partnership with Allan Hancock Community College, the community college in our region that serves the highest percentage of local students.
We are hopeful that this partnership will serve as a model that can be expanded to other community colleges throughout the state. It should be noted that alignment with our community college partners to facilitate transfer is another reason it is important for us to support the chancellor’s direction that we move to the semester system.
Summary
I realize the initiatives announced today are significant and will in some way impact every member of the campus community. I urge you to carefully read and review the chancellor’s letter and additional documents we will provide in the future. In doing so, I think you will agree that, collectively, these efforts, along with financial support from the CSU, will provide the groundwork to catapult Cal Poly toward an even brighter tomorrow — with enhanced student success driven by Learn by Doing and a fully implemented teacher-scholar model with additional tenure-track faculty (allowing for more time in research and other experiences with small groups of students).
As previously noted, campus leadership will engage in deep and collaborative conversations with CFAC and in accordance with shared governance as these initiatives are discussed and take shape. I will regularly communicate additional details as they become available.
In closing, I want to emphasize that while change can initially feel uncomfortable, these significant changes are essential to Cal Poly’s brightest future. Indeed, they are part of our path forward and upward.
Sincerely,
Jeffrey D. Armstrong
President
Click here for a printable version of Chancellor Castro's letter.
Letter from Chancellor Joseph I. Castro:
THE CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY
OFFICE OF THE CHANCELLOR
October 13, 2021
President Jeffrey D. Armstrong
California Polytechnic State University
San Luis Obispo | California | 93407
Dear President Armstrong:
Many thanks again for your hospitality and Cal Poly’s engagement during my virtual campus visit this past spring. One of Cal Poly’s strength has been its comprehensive polytechnic mission, which serves the entire state. As I stated last spring, I am excited about your future – your capability and capacity to serve more California students. I also reflect on something I have heard you state on many occasions: Cal Poly’s Learn by Doing – Ready-Day-One experience will not be complete until Cal Poly better represents the demographics of California.
I am writing to you today about a topic that arose briefly during my visit: Cal Poly’s quarter-system calendar. I am aware that the last time this issue was raised a few years ago, you were a strong advocate for retaining the quarter system. I also know that the Cal Poly community has had strong feelings about this issue when it has been raised. If this were an issue that only affected your campus, I would be inclined to leave it alone. But because the question of Cal Poly’s calendar affects students at other CSU campuses and at California’s community colleges, I cannot treat it as a purely local concern. Moreover, when this was discussed in 2012, there were six of the 23 campuses on quarter calendars.
Today, Cal Poly is the only CSU remaining on a quarter calendar. After much thought, and after watching the success of the other CSU campuses that have recently transitioned from quarters to semesters, I am resolute that the time has come for Cal Poly to adopt the semester system. It is my expectation that the transition will be implemented by the start of the 2025-26 academic year.
There are three main reasons why Cal Poly using a semester-based calendar will be beneficial:
1) Articulation and Equity – Adopting the same calendar as 113 of the 116 California community colleges will make it easier for students to transfer from a community college to Cal Poly, mostly by making articulation of courses easier but also creating opportunities for dual enrollment. This presents Cal Poly with the opportunity to enhance articulation of courses benefiting transfer students.
As you know, I am a passionate advocate for making that transition as easy as possible, because so many first-generation, low-income, and underrepresented-minority students begin their careers at a community college and then transfer to a CSU campus to finish their baccalaureate degree. Every barrier we can remove, consistent with providing excellent education, means that equitable access to the CSU is improved.
2) Student Success – Students on the quarter system often find that internships or summer jobs are established with the expectation that students will be done with school in early to mid-May, as opposed to the quarter system’s early to mid-June. This puts some opportunities out of reach entirely, or requires awkward workarounds like separate final exams, completing the last week or two of classes remotely, and so on. The same is true of study-abroad programs offered by other universities (90% of which, in the U.S., use semester-based calendars) as well as the CSU’s own fully online courses program. Finally, some students find the transition from semester-based high schools or community colleges to the quarter system to be very difficult—the quarter system moves at a very fast pace. Moving to semesters creates new opportunities for student success.
3) Administrative Efficiency – Under the quarter system, many administrative tasks—such as verifying vaccination status, calculating academic progress, completing financial aid reporting, hiring and on-boarding part-time faculty, and many others—need to be done three times a year rather than twice. Further, efforts to centralize and coordinate shared or common administrative tasks among campuses are more difficult and less efficient when campuses are on different calendars. As stewards of public funds, and of funds paid by our students as tuition and fees, we have a duty to be as efficient and prudent as possible.
As I mentioned the pace of quarters, I want to recognize that your task force report from 2012 noted two pedagogical benefits of quarters – pace and variety of courses. Both of these benefits can be retained following the transformational shift to semesters. Following your shared governance processes on campus, there is flexibility for courses to be broken into shorter lengths during a given semester. I am aware that your current summer quarter offers courses that are 5, 8 and 10 weeks long. There are also other universities (e.g., University of Arizona) where this practice has demonstrated positive results.
I would also like to address a few possible concerns. As you know, over the past 10 or so years, five CSU campuses have successfully transitioned from quarters to semesters: CSU Bakersfield, CSU Los Angeles, CSU San Bernardino, CSU East Bay, and your sister campus Cal Poly Pomona. Public colleges and universities in Ohio recently undertook a similar change. Their experiences have confirmed that although the transition will require work, it is possible to do it while taking the interests and concerns of all stakeholders into account.
For example, faculty would spend the same number of hours in the classroom over the academic year as they do now, would have a similar number of minutes of lecture to prepare each week, would probably do less grading (two sets of exams rather than three), and would no longer have to spend Spring Break frantically preparing for a new term. The staff will work the same number of hours and days as they do now, but will in many cases have slightly less work to complete, since there will only be two starts and two ends to academic terms during the main academic year. Students would of course not be set back in their academic progress, but would have their units converted from quarter to semester units and academic departments would be careful in planning programs to ensure full coverage of the relevant material.
Finally, as was true with the quarter-to-semester transitions at the other CSU campuses, the CSU will pay for the vast majority of the direct costs to achieve this transition.
I understand that this decision may not be immediately popular at Cal Poly. I ask you and the rest of the Cal Poly community to adopt the wider perspective on this change that I have laid out above. Under the semester calendar, Cal Poly’s students will still receive 30 weeks a year of world-class education, and, like students at 90% of U.S. colleges and universities, will be able to study the same things they study now.
Thus, everyone at Cal Poly will be at least as well off as they are now, and probably will be better off under a semester calendar. From my perspective, this is a win for everyone—both folks who are at Cal Poly today and those who will find more opportunities to enroll and succeed there tomorrow.
As always, I thank you for your support. Sometimes being a leader means making decisions that are beneficial but initially unpopular. I appreciate your commitment to Cal Poly, the California State University, and the state that we serve.
Sincerely,
Joseph I. Castro, Ph.D., M.P.P.
Chancellor
