Cal Lutheran is welcoming largest class

(THOUSAND OAKS, Calif. – Aug. 29, 2016) California Lutheran University is welcoming its largest freshman class.

More than 620 freshmen, a significant increase over last year’s record class, are expected to start classes Wednesday. Nearly half are in ethnic groups that are traditionally underrepresented on college campuses. Latinos make up 30 percent of the freshmen at Cal Lutheran, which was recently designated a Hispanic-serving institution. Nearly 40 percent are first-generation college students. New international undergraduates hail from 15 countries including Guatemala, Malaysia, Myanmar and Nigeria.

The freshmen and more than 250 transfer students started arriving on the Thousand Oaks campus Friday to move into residence halls and begin the five-day New Student Orientation. They participated in longstanding traditions like painting the CLU rocks on Mount Clef Ridge, although this was the first class to paint them purple to coordinate with school colors rather than white 

Most of the about 250 students in the Bachelor’s Degree for Professionals program will begin classes in Oxnard, Thousand Oaks and Woodland Hills this week also.

Most of the roughly 1,275 graduate students also begin classes next week. The first cohort in the new MBA for Experienced Professionals program will start in October. A new master’s in educational leadership program that started in Ridgecrest this summer will continue along with the cohorts in Thousand Oaks, Woodland Hills, Oxnard and on the Central Coast. Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary (PLTS) will start classes Sept. 6 in Berkeley.

When students arrive on the Thousand Oaks campus, they will find construction has started on William Rolland Studio Art Center. The two-story, 20,000-square-foot building will house high-tech classrooms and facilities for the Art and Multimedia departments when it opens in fall 2017. Next door in William Rolland Stadium, a new 38-foot-wide LED video scoreboard that will be used for football games and other athletic competitions and special events such as commencement, will greet students. This is the first New Student Orientation since the Student Union opened last year, so two activities gave every new student a chance to experience it: a commuter student lunch Friday and a game night Saturday where students played foosball and shuffleboard and enjoyed other features.

With a total enrollment of more than 4,100 students, Cal Lutheran is based in Thousand Oaks with additional locations in Woodland Hills, Westlake Village, Oxnard, and Berkeley and on the Central Coast. The university offers programs through its College of Arts and Sciences, School of Management, Graduate School of Education, Graduate School of Psychology and PLTS.