CSUF Moves to Utilize Its Classrooms More Fully : Budget: The school, beset by fund shortages, will offer early-morning and Saturday lectures to ease the crunch.

Faced with cramming more students into a limited number of classrooms in response to the state budget crisis, Cal State Fullerton for the first time will add regular 7 a.m. and Saturday morning lecture classes this fall, officials said Friday.

The number of courses offered in some areas also will be reduced as the university moves to consolidate students into larger classrooms, according to Jack Coleman, Cal State Fullerton’s vice president for academic affairs.

In the past, occasional early-morning and Saturday classes have been offered to meet special scheduling needs. The new fall schedule will mean that the university will have an extra hour a day and several more hours on Saturdays to use the 16 classrooms that can hold 80 or more students, Coleman explained.

Faculty and student response so far has been favorable, particularly to the crack-of-dawn classes.

“We’ve had volunteers who want to teach the early classes, and we’re getting reasonable responses from the students,” Coleman said. “It may serve as a niche for the person who wants to get in a class and still make it to work.”

Still, other hard choices remain over how to trim at least $14.1 million from the university’s $125-million budget. Even that figure may not be enough now that the projected state deficit has nearly doubled from $7 billion in January to almost $13 billion this week.

Fullerton administrators will continue to weigh options for other cuts or reallocation of resources this spring, even without a final state budget. But Coleman reiterated that the school will try to avoid layoffs of permanent employees, especially those whose jobs, if lost, would have an adverse impact on students.

“I’m optimistic the campus will experience minimal layoffs, if any, by the time this (budget process) settles down,” Coleman said. “But you have to add a big proviso. . . . It depends on how the state comes to grips with almost double the original projected deficit.”

Meanwhile, student applications for the fall semester are up 4%, which is to be expected during these recessionary times as more people try to improve their skills or learn new ones to make them more marketable, university officials said.

But enrollment can grow only 1.7% next fall because of a shortage of available classrooms and facilities, a chronic problem since building on the Fullerton campus has not kept pace with enrollment gains, Coleman said.

For that reason, the university closed admissions Thursday to applicants in math and science, social sciences, communications, the humanities and fine arts. That is slightly ahead of schedule this year. However, demand was so great among business majors and the undecided that admissions for those people were closed in February.

Coleman emphasized that Cal State is continuing to accept applications from engineering, computer science and nursing majors, as well as graduate students in education, counseling and teacher-certification programs, and minority students in any discipline.

“We’ve been under a controlled-growth plan for some time now,” Coleman said. “We’re basically trying to match facilities to our head count.”

Applications are limited sooner in some areas in order to ensure that the campus’s more than 25,000 full- and part-time students are balanced across a range of academic areas.

“We don’t want to become completely a school of business at the expense of other disciplines,” Coleman said.

Given the expected budget constraints, the university is trying to be especially careful that it doesn’t accept more students than it can reasonably teach.

“We are going to have a very difficult time servicing the students we will get,” Coleman warned. “There’s a real need, a real desire not to oversubscribe our enrollment, so that those students we do admit will have a reasonable opportunity to get a quality education.”