RSS Feed
Print Story
E-mail Story
Bakersfield students pick Taft over BC
| Tuesday, Jul 4 2006 8:30 PM
Last Updated: Tuesday, Jul 4 2006 8:52 PM
TAFT — Lindsey Moore lives in Bakersfield, but she never considered going to a community college here in the city.
Our readers recommend:
Loading Stories
Instead, she and hundreds of other Bakersfield students chose Taft College, about 40 miles from downtown Bakersfield. Over the past five years, the small community college has been attracting an increasingly large number of Bakersfield students despite its distance from the city.
“I like the smaller class sizes,” said Moore, 17, shortly before the start of her public speaking class recently. “You get more one-on-one.”
This past spring, 337 students from Bakersfield high schools enrolled for classes on campus at Taft, according to Taft College data. That’s up from only 156 students from Bakersfield in spring 2001. Many of those students say they chose Taft because of its smaller feel and cost-savings programs.
Taft student Tara Capaldi, 18, spends hours a week commuting from Bakersfield to Taft. Still, she said the cost of going to Taft instead of Bakersfield College is negligible.
That’s because Taft gives her $100 in gas vouchers each term and the college allows her to rent her books instead of buy them. Gas vouchers are available to students taking at least 12 hours, with a 2.0 GPA who live five miles or more from campus, said Taft dean of student services Brock McMurray. The gas voucher program started this year and will continue through the fall, said spokesman Dennis McCall.
Students can also rent their books for 10 percent to 20 percent of the book’s cost, McMurray said. Moore’s public speaking textbook cost her $5.80 to rent. Capaldi said one semester, she rented six books and bought another for a total of about $80.
“It kind of evens out,” Capaldi said. “You wouldn’t be spending a lot on gas at Bakersfield College, but here you get gas vouchers.”
Both Capaldi and Moore said they live in southwest Bakersfield, which also made the decision to go to Taft easier. Both have been friends since they were children.
They estimate it wouldn’t be that much faster for them to drive to Bakersfield College in northeast Bakersfield, depending on traffic.
Taft student Adrian Orozco, 20, has a longer drive. He travels to class in Taft several times a week from the East Hills Mall, where he works.
Bakersfield College is much closer to his workplace than Taft College, but Orozco said he prefers Taft’s atmosphere. He likes to meet new people and worries that Bakersfield College would be filled with the same people he went to high school with at South High School.
According to Bakersfield College data, 136 students from Orozco’s graduating class at South — 25 percent — went to BC in fall 2004.
Capaldi, who graduated from North High in 2005 said she also chose Taft partly to meet people from outside her high school. Twenty-seven percent of her graduating class went to Bakersfield College in fall 2005.
“You kind of want to get away, but a lot of people from Bakersfield are coming here, so you can’t really do that any more,” Capaldi said.
Both Capaldi and Moore, however, said they’d like to eventually transfer to Bakersfield College and then Cal State Bakersfield to pursue careers in the medical field.
Justin Hallmark, who also travels from Bakersfield to Taft for classes, said that’s one drawback of going to a smaller school — less course selection.
But he said it’s worth it for the small, personal atmosphere.
“The classes are limited in variety,” he said, “but you just take the good with the bad.”