Classes Resume Monday : UC Irvine Expects Most Students Ever

UC Irvine is preparing to open Monday with more students and more construction under way than ever in its history, university officials said Wednesday.

UCI Chancellor Jack W. Peltason and campus officials said at a morning meeting that the 22-year-old Irvine campus:

- Expects a record 15,000 enrollment by the final tally in early October.

- Has $120 million in construction projects under way.

- Will have another $180 million in new buildings started in the next three years.

- Starts the new academic year with 45 new faculty members and prospects for 12 more.

- Is gaining national prominence in the field of humanities.

“And besides all of that, we’re going to have a very good basketball team this year,” Peltason said.

Peltason and Associate Vice Chancellor David Neuman said new roads will be built on the southern, undeveloped part of the campus. The primary entrance to the university ultimately will be on the south side, connected to Bonita Canyon Road, they said.

‘Developing as Planned’

“By the early part of the 21st Century, we expect to have 30,000 students on this campus and at the medical center,” Peltason said. “Actually, that’s pretty much what was projected when the campus started. The campus is developing as planned.”

Peltason said UCI had to limit enrollment growth this year because of limited room to house or teach new students. UCI will admit only about 500 new students this academic year, and more of the new students are juniors and seniors, Peltason said. Lack of classroom space for freshmen was a main reason the university gave preference to students who had already completed a year or two of college elsewhere, Peltason said.

Hundreds more potential new students were qualified for UC admittance but simply couldn’t be accommodated this year, according to William Parker, associate executive vice chancellor.

Admission Guaranteed

“We don’t know exactly how many hundreds were qualified and couldn’t be admitted,” he said. “The reason is that when we started filling up, we let high school counselors know, and applications dropped off.”

Parker said that as part of UCI’s campaign to limit new enrollments, the university urged many applicants to go to community colleges for a year or two and then apply to UCI. Parker said UCI guaranteed admission to qualified students who attended community college their freshman year.

The UCI officials said the campus is gaining a national reputation for academic leadership in the humanities. Leading professors in the humanities, recruited in recent years, have in turn attracted other prominent humanities scholars, Parker said.

“Our reputation in the humanities is having an enormous synergistic effect,” Parker said.

This year, UCI also becomes the home of the new Humanities Research Institute, a studies program for the nine-campus UC system. Eventually, up to 25 scholars in the humanities will come to UCI each year to do research on some aspect of language, literature, philosophy or other disciplines in the humanities.