There will be more students to cheer on the Aggie sports teams this year.
When classes begin Thursday, a student body of 26,104 is anticipated, up 1,012 from last fall’s 25,092.
Total undergraduate enrollment is expected to rise by 847. About 4,300 new freshmen, drawn from a record pool of 25,284 applicants, likely will register by the start of classes. That’s an incease of 475 from last fall.
An estimated 700 of the 1,775 new transfer students, from a record applicant pool of 5,822, will have participated in the Transfer Admission Agreement program with 60 community colleges throughout the state.
Upper-division students will make up 58 percent of the undergraduate student body this year.
New graduate and professional students are expected to increase their ranks by 123, for a total of 3,547. Health science enrollments should increase by 29, to 1,970, and enrollments in the Working Professional MBA program by 13, to 280.
The newly admitted domestic freshman class’s average grade-point is 3.85 and mean Scholastic Aptitude Test score is 1,230. More than 15.4 percent of the newly admitted domestic freshmen are from underrepresented ethnic groups, compared to 13.4 percent last year. About 57 percent are women.
Here’s a snapshot of what this fall’s students will find as they arrive next week:
Course availability
As of Monday, most students were able to enroll in 12 or more units: 89 percent of freshmen, 87 percent of sophomores, 87 percent of juniors and 81 percent of seniors.
Students needing to pick up additional courses to complete their schedules will find a variety of open-course sections and classroom seats. Currently, about 700 sections with some 14,500 seats are available within the College of Letters and Science.
"This is clearly a testament to the excellent work that faculty and staff have done in monitoring their enrollments and in striving to match course offerings to student demand, even in an environment of student enrollment growth," said Fred Wood, associate dean of the College of Letters and Science.
Openings exist in many popular introductory courses, such as calculus and statistics, and the waiting lists are relatively short in such high-demand courses as general chemistry.
Courses in the social sciences continue to be very popular, and extra sections with increased capacity have been added. While many introductory and advanced courses are full, students will find openings in a limited number of sections and courses.
English composition courses are full at both the introductory and advanced levels, as they are every fall quarter, despite the addition of new sections. However, students should be able to find seats in the winter quarter.
Wait lists are relatively long for introductory language courses in Chinese, Japanese and Spanish; French and German courses are also full at this time. But students will find openings in introductory courses in Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Latin and Russian. As in the past, students may request "simultaneous enrollment" to enroll in a course at another college when its equivalent at UC Davis is full.
For example, students electing to study Spanish might choose to enroll in a comparable course at Sacramento City College until the more advanced course is available at UC Davis.
Fees and financial aid
Undergraduate students who are California residents will pay $4,072 this school year, and resident academic graduate students will pay $4,591.
Between 55 percent and 65 percent of the undergraduate student body is expected to receive some form of financial aid.
So far, aid totaling $84 million--in loans, grants, work study and scholarships--has been awarded to about 11,000 undergraduates for 2000-01. The average indebtedness of a new bachelor’s degree graduate totals about $12,000 to $15,000.
Housing
With a number of new facilities available for students this fall, housing should not be as tight as it has been in recent years.
The Colleges, new this fall, houses more than 600 continuing undergraduate, graduate and professional students. On campus property west of Recreation Hall, the complex is privately owned and managed by Tandem Properties.
Unavailable last year during renovations, Emerson Hall re-opens this fall to accommodate 500 freshmen.
Building and renovation
The campus is in the midst of its biggest building boom in at least 12 years. Projects worth well over $200 million are now in planning, design or construction.
Among them:
• Wall panels are going up on a plant and environmental sciences building north of Veihmeyer Hall. The 125,000-square-foot building, to be completed in fall 2001, will replace aging Hoagland and Hunt halls and provide lab and office space for the agronomy and range science and the land, air and water resources departments.
• The foundation and walls are going up on the Center for the Arts, which is scheduled to be completed for the 2002 season. It will include a 1,800-seat main hall and a studio theater for up to 250 people.
• The Walker Hall replacement project, west of Crocker Nuclear Lab, is finished.
• Planning continues on student recreation facilities being supported by an increase in student fees passed by students in 1999. The projects include a student activity and recreation center, an aquatic center and a multi-use stadium.
Parking and transportation
The new three-level South Entry Parking Structure will open Monday (see story above). And later this fall, a new service will provide transportation about the campus for those conducting university business. It is designed for individuals or groups attending meetings, moving to and from satellite locations, or needing to transport presentation materials to sites in the closed core area of campus.
A new shuttle service will make three round trips daily between UC Davis and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Members of the campus community may reserve one of 13 seats.
More electric vehicle charging stations are available on campus. Information on the shuttle service and the charging stations is available on the World Wide Web at http://www-fleet.ucdavis.edu/.
A new service now allows faculty, staff and students to purchase parking permits on line with a credit card. Each permit purchased on the Web site will be processed within two business days.
The annual Transportation Fair will be in October at the Silo Union Courtyard, says Transportation and Parking Services Director Brodie Hamilton.
Participants will learn about carpool, vanpool, transit and bike commute options, as well as air quality and traffic congestion.
Bicycle license fees have increased for the first time since 1982. A new bike license now costs $8, up from $6. Renewals are now $4, up from $3.
Several roads and bike paths have been resurfaced, and additional high-security bike racks installed over the summer.
Bicycles at bargain prices will be available at the campus’s biannual bike auction, 9 a.m. Saturday, Oct. 7, behind the Fire/Police Building on Kleiber Hall Drive. Bikes can be previewed at 8 a.m. More than 350 used bikes, as well as unclaimed lost-and-found items, will be available to the highest bidder.