Cal Poly to expand school year with regular summer classes. Here’s how it’ll work

Cal Poly’s San Luis Obispo campus will soon be busy year-round, according to a new university initiative that will launch in fall 2024.

The year-round operation initiative will give some Cal Poly students the opportunity to take regular classes during the summer quarter — a time normally reserved for work, internships, travel and leisure.

In turn for taking summer classes, the students will get another quarter off during the academic year for those summertime activities.

“Think of year-round operation as increasing students’ opportunities at Cal Poly by increasing availability of beds, labs and classrooms, by increasing attendance in the summer, and, ultimately, by slightly lowering attendance during the fall, winter and spring terms,” Cal Poly President Jeffrey Armstrong said in a prepared statement on Monday.

The first cohort of students will include up to 600 students from the College of Liberal Arts, the College of Engineering and the Orfalea College of Business.

One third of those 600 students will be off campus during each term of the 2024-25 academic year. This will allow Cal Poly to increase its overall enrollment while not overcrowding the campus during the fall, winter or spring terms.

Then, those 600 students could take classes during the summer of 2024.

“As we gain experience with year-round operation, we will expand the number of majors and the number of students involved using this model, so that actual head count on campus in any given term will be significantly lower than the university’s overall enrollment for the year,” Armstrong said.

Several thousand students — perhaps as many as 6,000 — could be taking classes during the summer on Cal Poly’s campus under full implementation of the year-round operations expected within the next few years. However, summer enrollment is not expected to be nearly as high as fall, winter or spring enrollment, according to the university.

The year-round operations differ from the university’s currently offered summer courses and quarter plus program, Armstrong said.

Although the year-round operations allow Cal Poly to increase overall enrollment, it will not exceed 25,000 students on campus during any given term until after 2035.

After then, Cal Poly is expected to have more housing to accommodate a student body of more than 25,000, Armstrong said.

Roughly 22,114 students are expected to be enrolled in on-campus classes this fall, according to university projections in August.

Of those, 8,801 students were set to move into on-campus housing last week and this week. That’s the highest number of students ever living on Cal Poly’s campus.

Cal Poly’s year-round operations initiative is expected to help the California State University system meet budget increase requirements set by Gov. Gavin Newsom.

The CSU is expected to meet targets that include increasing graduation rates, growing enrollment and narrowing equity gaps to receive an annual 5% bump in state funding.

Students may see greater opportunities to take part in activities such as study abroad, internships, service learning projects and research projects under Cal Poly’s year-round operations, according to Armstrong.

The university has received an anonymous $300,000 annual donation to help support students who wish to partake in those activities.

Year-round operations won’t come without its challenges.

For example, the crowded summer term is usually when the university embarks on campus improvement and renovation projects.

Having classrooms and residence halls full during the summer could pose as a roadblock for getting those projects started, Armstrong told The Tribune in an interview.

“You have to have a critical mass so that it’s efficient to offer the housing, the food and the classes,” Armstrong said. “Only having 600 students on campus is not the most efficient, but you have to start somewhere.”

Armstrong said he’s excited to embark on the year-round operations experiment at Cal Poly.

“We’re a destination campus,” he said. “Let’s be a destination year round.”