CSUSM Anticipates Record Enrollment for Fall Semester

Total enrollment at Cal State San Marcos could reach a historic high this fall as the University welcomes over 2,500 new freshmen and transfer students to campus bringing total enrollment to about 10,000 students – an increase of 3 percent over fall 2010.“We continue to grow as a University, and the applications we received for fall admission demonstrate quite significantly that CSUSM continues to be a high-demand campus within the California State University system,” said Darren Bush, associate vice president of Enrollment Management Services.For fall 2011 admission, the University received over 16,000 applications from undergraduates with freshmen accounting for nearly two-thirds of that applicant pool. With the CSU determining target enrollment goals for each of its 23 campuses amid ongoing budget constraints, CSUSM admitted more than 55 percent of its applicant pool, but was not able to accommodate about 3,500 applicants. As CSUSM welcomes its new and returning Cougars to campus for the first day of classes on Monday, August 29, new faces will include 25 new faculty members as well as five new academic deans. Thirty-three special topic courses will also debut this semester including: Art and Social Change; Protest, Power and Change in the Middle East; the History of American Families; and Economics and Wellbeing. The new courses, which allow faculty to introduce innovative curriculum before beginning a lengthy formal course submission process, will be among the 1,478 class sections offered this fall. Nearly 175 of those will be taught in the University’s state-of-the-art Social and Behavioral Sciences Building (SBSB), which officially opens its doors at the start of the semester.To help better monitor increased demand for courses associated with student population growth, several departments, including those in the College of Business Administration, participated in a pilot wait-list system, which allowed students to add their name to virtual lists when courses filled during registration. The system enabled more than 1,300 students to move from wait lists into classes without the need of crashing courses at the start of the semester.Final enrollment at will be released at census in late September. Cal State San Marcos will be closed to new student enrollment for the spring having already exceeded its enrollment target.