First-day facts: 09-22-97

September 22, 1997

First-day facts

UCSC is expecting an opening-day enrollment of approximately 10,450 students, compared to an enrollment of 10,215 last fall. A student body of 10,450 would be the largest in the campus's history--exceeding the 10,255 who enrolled in fall 1992.
Of the 10,450 students, approximately 9,450 are expected to be undergraduates; 1,000, enrolled in graduate studies.
Of the undergraduate total, approximately 3,100 will be new students (freshmen and transfer students), compared to 2,977 new undergraduates last fall.
These 3,100 new undergraduates were among the 15,664 applicants for undergraduate admission, also the largest number in campus history.

The five most popular majors are (in order): psychology, biology, literature, computer science, and environmental studies.
An estimated 21.6 percent of the new undergraduates come from the Monterey Bay-Santa Clara Valley region. In fact, 70 percent of the new students come from three geographic regions: San Francisco Bay Area, 26.4 percent; Los Angeles/South Coast, 22.1 percent; and the Monterey Bay-Santa Clara Valley, 21.6 percent.

To help offset a shortage of rental housing in the surrounding community, UCSC has added 368 new "bed spaces" to its on-campus housing total this year, exceeding the expected increase of 235 in the student body.
UCSC has developed a new temporary modular housing complex, called "The Village," on the site where residence halls will one day be built at College Ten. The Village is providing new on-campus housing for 171 students.
In addition, UCSC's housing staff reconfigured existing housing units this summer, creating housing for another 197 students.
UCSC is now providing on-campus housing space for 4,486 of its students, by far the highest percentage in the UC system.

For the first time in UCSC's history, new students will be able to acquire a grade-point average. The change results from an Academic Senate proposal, passed last year, that extends the letter-grade option to nearly all courses offered at UCSC. In recent years, UCSC students could request letter grades in most upper-division and some lower-division courses. The expanded grading system retains UCSC's Narrative Evaluation System.
UCSC's new School of Engineering will be greeting its first new class of students. The Jack Baskin School of Engineering was established last May. Instruction is beginning this fall for freshmen in electrical engineering, the first of several new degree programs that will join existing Departments of Computer Engineering and Computer Science to comprise UCSC's first professional school.
Students living at four--Cowell, Stevenson, Crown, and Merrill--of UCSC's eight colleges and at The Village will have access in their living quarters to a new fiber-optic communications system, dubbed "SlugNet," providing enhanced telephone and Internet connections. The remaining campus residences will come online by fall 1999.