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Just as demand jumps, the university's president and provost agree that 48,000 students is too many and talk of cutting back admissions.
By BARRY KLEIN, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times, published January 3, 2002
Even as Florida universities are being flooded with applications, the state's most elite school may soon decide to cut -- or at least cap -- its undergraduate enrollment.
"The University of Florida has become too big," said UF president Charles Young. He said the campus and the Gainesville community are struggling to accommodate the 48,000 students and thousands of faculty and staff now associated with UF.
Young said he will soon convene a committee of administrators, faculty and university trustees to discuss a significant "pruning"' of undergraduate programs. The process is expected to take about six months.
"The purpose is to identify what we can consolidate or eliminate and still serve the needs of our students and the state," said UF provost David Colburn, the school's chief academic officer.
Colburn said he is troubled that many freshmen and sophomores are forced to take almost exclusively large classes, which at UF often means more than 100 students packed into a lecture hall.
"It troubles me even more that students in their third and fourth years also are in classes larger than they should be for the experience we want to provide," he said.
No one is expecting large cuts in enrollment, not when the number of students applying to Florida universities is up so dramatically.
UF is expecting at least 25,000 applications for 6,500 seats, an increase of about 25 percent over last year. Other universities are reporting a similar surge, which is a huge jump from previous years, when annual enrollment growth rarely topped 5 percent statewide.
Some educators credit Bright Futures, the state's generous scholarship program, for much of the increase. Others say it is a product of the declining economy; people in bad times often return to school to learn new skills or enhance their resumes.
UF is accustomed to high demand for its freshman seats. But as the state's premier research institution, it wants to concentrate future growth at the graduate and professional school level.
That will require cuts to undergraduate programs. For high school seniors with less than stellar academic credentials, the results could be unpleasant.
The average SAT score for UF freshmen is almost 1,300. That's on a par with some Ivy League schools. The average GPA for freshmen is just under a perfect 4.0.
If future freshman classes shrink, or if the numbers of applicants continue to grow, those standards will only get tougher.
The situation is not as tight at the University of South Florida, which until recently accepted almost every qualified student who applied. But USF officials have said for several years that they intend to cap undergraduate enrollment at the Tampa campus, which reached 30,000 this fall.
They want to shift future growth to USF's regional campuses in St. Petersburg, Lakeland and Sarasota.
In some ways, all of Florida's universities are facing the same problem: how to accommodate increased demand at a time of shrinking state support.
The 11 public universities are still trying to absorb cuts made last month as a result of Florida's budget shortfall. They could be looking at another round of cuts later this year.
But while resources are a major consideration, Colburn says other pressures are driving UF's reordering of priorities.
"We want to be considered among the nation's top 10 public universities, and right now, depending on who you read, we're anywhere from 13th to 18th," he said.
"If we're going to get there, we can't continue to be all things for all people."