"We are in the process of recruiting (new employees)," said Fitima Jackson, the manager of visitor relations and new student programs. "There are three positions posted on our Web site."
The staff hosts admission days at San Jose State University, provides campus tours to prospective students, gives admission presentations at area high schools and community colleges and offers admission counseling on campus every Monday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Jackson said.
These are all services that SJSU is required by the CSU system to provide within Santa Clara County, which includes about 60 high schools and 20 community colleges, she said.
Jackson said they also provide services for out-oftown students who might come to the SJSU campus or want to speak to a counselor over the phone.
SJSU Services Survey
To help understand how the department of visitor relations and admissions counseling can better serve local high schools and community colleges, it sent out a survey to the schools, said Marshall Rose, the associate vice president of enrollment and academic services.
The survey asked the schools which services they received in the past year, how often they received them and which services they thought were the most important, he said.
The schools picked an admission presentation at their school as the No. 1 needed service, while a student's visit to SJSU was rated as No. 2 and appointments with SJSU staff at their particular high school or community college campus was rated as No. 3.
Out of all the schools surveyed, only 15 responded that they had received the No. 1 rated service, an admission presentation at their school, while 25 responded that their students had visited SJSU, the No. 2 rated service.
"With the budget cuts and the type of services we provided, there's not been adequate staffi ng to provide the services equitably (throughout all of the schools)," Rose said.
He said the survey would help determine how to better distribute needed resources to the local schools.
"One of the things we found out is that one school received 10 services while others didn't receive any," Rose said.
They would like to redistribute the "wealth" of high school and community college campus visits, said Jackson, the manager of visitor relations and new student programs.
"Instead of going to one school twice, (we) would go to a different school the second time," she said.
Although the recruiting is not targeted to the East Side Union High School District, they probably received the most services in the last few years, Jackson said.
She said that test scores and demographics were a large determining factor, but that federal grants are also an influence.
Pre-College Programs
There are six pre-college programs at SJSU that come through federal grants, said Frank Castillo, the associate director of academic services.
They are the Upward Bound Project, Educational Talent Search, the Parent Empowerment Council, the Collaborative Training Institute, the Test Preparation Academy, and a federal dissemination partnership, he said.
The programs come about through a nationwide competition for grants for "soft money," Castillo said. He said the students involved in these programs must be either first generation college students or from low-income families.
"(The programs) address students who are not geared for college, to provide that opportunity, that access for post-secondary education," Castillo said.
The grants are decided by a committee that chooses what it considers to be the best programs to provide services to the local community and must be renewed every four years, he said.
One of the requirements for the grants is that the programs must single out the lowest performing and neediest schools, Castillo said. He said they also have to determine how SJSU can help the schools improve and prepare more students for college.
He said the programs have a lot of success stories, and three of them graduated from SJSU and are now working in his department.
"You know this staff is passionate, and committed to doing the best work that we can. It's wonderful to hear the staff ... share their stories," he said.
One of these staff members is Blanca Sanchez, the academic coordinator for academic services, who graduated from SJSU in 2003.
She is the first in her family to attend college, she said, and all of her three siblings have also had some sort of post-secondary education, which she attributes in part to her involvement with the Upward Bound program from 1995 to 1998.
Sanchez took the bus from San Jose Academy to SJSU for tutoring once per week in the afternoon, and got a ride from her parents to attend classes on Saturdays. She said she also attended a number of workshops.
"Tutoring helped me with my classes, especially with math and science, ... (but) the most important influence was helping me get to college," Sanchez said.
She said the program helped her understand what the college entrance requirements were, and helped her when it came time to fill out college applications and financial aid forms.
"I decided to come here to SJSU, and the fact that I had been coming here for (three) years made it easier, it was just like continuing with what I was already doing," Sanchez said.
Campus Visits
Campus visits are very important in helping students decide to go to college, said Marilyn Bliss, the medical magnet coordinator for Andrew Hill High School in San Jose.
About 50 Andrew Hill High School students come to SJSU each year to visit the recreation and leisure, kinesiology, nutrition, nursing, occupational therapy and health science departments, she said.
"The kids kind of get an idea of what SJSU is like. They understand the majors because they do something that's interactive, (such as) body fat testing for nutrition ... hula hoops for occupational therapy, and they talk about why people do those things," Bliss said.
But last year, SJSU had a problem with its budget and could not afford to host the visit, Bliss said. This year she called and offered to help SJSU find a way to make the visit possible, and they put it together, she said.
"I think if you have your connections in place there's ways around problems so that kids can participate," Bliss said.
Andrew Hill High School is only one mile away from SJSU, Bliss said, but a lot of the students have never seen the university before.
She said the visit helps the students see that there are other people just like them who go to SJSU, and it makes them see that it is possible.