Education: Dr. Fix-It Goes to Santa Cruz

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Still, the school's laid-back image has lately begun to work against it. Students today are reluctant to confront graduate schools and employers with unconventional college grade transcripts. As a result, enrollment at Santa Cruz began to slip after reaching 6,134 in 1976. Last year U.C. President David Saxon warned that the campus would have to trim its faculty unless enrollment rose significantly by 1983. This year the student body is up to 6,472 but that figure includes 460 students who wanted to go to the University of California at Berkeley and came to U.C.S.C. only because they were promised they could transfer to Berkeley later.

One such "redirect," Sophomore Susan Evans, 19, says she likes U.C.S.C. and believes the professors "bend over backward" to help their students. She wants to graduate from Berkeley, though, because of its prestige. But redirected Berkeley Applicant Emily Buchbinder, 18 plans to stay at Santa Cruz, because, she believes, it has a better program in her major, politics. "I'm definitely glad I came here," she says. "I feel I belong, and I don't think I would have felt that way if I had gone to Berkeley."

Preventing the threatened faculty cut backs is Richard Moll's goal as the new dean of admissions. Author of a guide book for high schoolers and their parents titled Playing the Private College Admissions Game, now selling well in paper back, Moll is at work on a second book, The Public Ivies: Admission to a New National Elite. Joined by new recruiters, Moll plans to visit 600 high schools this year to sell Santa Cruz. Predictably he has also printed 30,000 copies of U.C.S.C.'s first glossy "view book" full of color photos of the Pacific seacoast and sunsets amid the redwoods. The essence of his sales pitch, though, is no more flamboyant than Clark Kerr's original vision of Santa Cruz. Moll calls the school "the near perfect hybrid," blending the large public university and the small private college. "This place feels like Vassar or Bowdoin," he says. "The academic tone, the small size and the location all contribute to the feeling of a private college. But we draw on the resources of a famous, good — maybe the best — public university system."

Moll also intends to compete on price, since the yearly cost at state-supported Santa Cruz is as low as $3,400 for Californians. Says he: "Any number of families will strain to get the money for Stanford or Harvard or perhaps Duke. I'm not certain that those families will strain as hard to get $8,500 or more for less prestigious private colleges such as Skidmore or Vanderbilt or Boston University — superb as those institutions are. Here sits a state university that feels like one of those private colleges, at a lower price for an out-of-stater, and in a state where one can become a resident within a year and pay in-state prices for three years."