Student Applicants Flood CSU San Marcos : Education: For the first time, the new university may have to turn away qualified applicants for spring semester.

Still in its inaugural year, Cal State San Marcos will turn away qualified student applicants for the upcoming spring semester, university officials said Thursday.

The university last Monday stopped accepting applications for the semester beginning in January. As late as Thursday, only an estimate of the number of applicants was available.

“Our expectations were exceeded, and it looks like we are going to have just under 400 applications for the spring,” said Betty Huff, director of admissions.

Although none of the applications have been processed yet, Huff expects that more than 90% will meet the school’s entrance requirements.

Huff said the campus, at 283 full-time students, is already above the 250 students that had been budgeted for this year. The new applicants will easily push the number of full-time students beyond 300, although no one is quite sure by how many, Huff said.

Students applying to the university’s teacher’s credential program, its only post-baccalaureate program, accounted for more than 100 of the applicants, school officials said.

The credentialed program, however, has space for only 25 more students in the spring, and it is likely that qualified applicants will be turned away, said Dorothy Lloyd, director of the program.

“We will be looking at test scores, students will come in for personal interviews, they must have completed field experience, and there is their grade-point average to consider,” Lloyd said.

“I hope that the students that don’t make it this time will reapply for the fall, because the fall class will be much larger,” Lloyd said.

Accepting even 25 students is a stretch of the school’s resources, she said. The 52 students accepted into the program for this semester were two more than expected.

“It squeezed our budget to do it, but it would have been terrible not to take in any students this spring. We would not have been serving our community if we did not,” Lloyd said.

The school delayed hiring both administrative and support personnel until the fall in order to accept the added students, she said.

Interest in the credential program had been building ever since the opening of school, Lloyd said, with as many as 30 inquiries a day from prospective students.

“We’re not really surprised at the number of applicants,” Lloyd said. “We had heard that there was a great need for teachers in the North County area, and we are in a prime location for students.”

Lloyd said the university plans to accept 75 to 80 students for the credential program in the fall of 1991.

Huff, director of admissions, said she does not expect any baccalaureate students to be turned away. Dean of students Ernest Zomalt expects that about 10% of the baccalaureate students will not enroll when classes begin next year, given the university’s experience.

“Out of the group that is readily admissible (both baccalaureate and post-baccalaureate students), we’re thinking that there would be something on the order of 200 to 210 of the 380 to 390 applicants that would in fact enroll,” Zomalt said. “Our analysis of available space would indicate that we can absorb that number.”

Zomalt said that at least two faculty positions will be filled to help handle the influx of students but conceded that the student-to-faculty ratio will probably rise slightly, particularly in business courses.