Orange County Register

UC  Irvine sharply reduced its freshmen class and is offering far fewer courses this fall due to the state budget crisis. But the university’s enrollment has hit 27,792, the highest since UCI opened  in idyllic pasture land  in 1965.

Enrollment is up because of a long-planned UC-wide hike in transfer students and modest increases in the number of graduate students, Irvine officials say. Some students also might be slowing their drive toward a degree due to the poor job market.

The enrollment increase comes as UCI is in the process of reducing costs by more than $70 million to help balance the state budget. The savings are being achieved through furloughs, lay-offs, a general hiring freeze, and a cut it academic programs, among other things. Still, overall enrollment ticked upward.

It’s unclear whether the cutbacks, combined with the enrollment increase, is significantly affecting the quality of education,  or whether it is preventing large numbers of students from getting the classes they need to graduate in a timely fashion.

UCI enrolled 4,030 new freshmen this fall, or 553 fewer than last year. But the number of transfer students rose by 389, to 1,732.

“First, when you add in teaching credential students, graduate academics/graduate professionals in state-funded programs, and graduate students in self-supporting programs, the total incoming cohort of new students in Fall 2008 was 7,377 students; for Fall 2009, that total is 7,274, or a reduction of just 103 students year-over-year,” says Cathy Lawhon, a university spokeswoman.

“As you can see, the decline in new enrollments this Fall was not quite as stark as the reduction in new freshmen might lead one to believe: partially offsetting that decline were increases in transfer students, in teaching credential students, and in graduate students in the health sciences and in self-supporting programs.”

Lawhon adds by email that “the big increase in new transfers from 2008 to 2009 was due
to two things: 1) the other half of UC’s enrollment plan for 2009-10: increasing transfer student enrollments system-wide as a partial offset to the reductions in new freshman enrollments, and 2) our campus’s desire, for pedagogical reasons, to close Winter 2010 to any new transfer admissions.

“Transfer students who enter in Fall rather than Winter get to take advantage of campus orientation programs at the beginning of the year and also fit into our course sequences better. We think changing our admissions timing for transfer students should improve their retention and graduation rates.

“We have been enrolling about 300 or so new transfers in previous Winter Quarters, so this Fall’s increase is essentially the 100 students called for in the new (University of California Office of the President) enrollment plan plus 300 students who would ordinarily have enrolled in Winter 2010.

“The second point is that student continuation rates also contribute to total enrollment. The average time-to-degree for new freshmen is just over 13 quarters, or slightly more than 4 years. Graduate students, of course, take even longer to graduate, as much as 6 to 8 years. So the total student population continues to grow because some of the students who first enrolled in previous years haven’t graduated yet.

“We suspect some students may intentionally be taking longer to graduate so that they can stay in school rather than face the depressed job market.  However, we have no data to confirm or refute those suspicions.”

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