MATT CAPOWSKI/Arizona Daily Wildcat Marketing senior Sam Chang, the executive vice president of ASUA, leads a campus tour for potential students Wednesday afternoon. About 16,000 applicants were accepted into next year's freshman class, although only about 6,000 are expected to attend.

More freshmen were accepted into next year's class than this year's, but officials are projecting that the actual class size will remain about the same.

About 16,000 applicants were accepted this year - 85 percent of the total applicant pool - but Admissions Director Lori Goldman said she expects that only about 6,000 will choose to attend UA. This year's freshman class contained 5,949 students.

Goldman said more new students were accepted this year than last year, but based on the number of housing confirmations and registration commitments, the class size is not likely to increase.

"Our data on housing and commitments has been very reliable in the past, and we have no reason to believe otherwise for this year," Goldman said. "If more students confirm than we are currently projecting, Undergraduate Education will begin the process of working with the colleges to ensure that there are plenty of classes for all new students."

Goldman said fewer out-of-state students may be coming to the University of Arizona this year because Americans have become more cautious since Sept. 11.

In past years, admissions officials were not strict about enforcing the April 1 application cutoff date. But in order to control the size of next year's class, they adhered to that deadline closely, and increased the out-of-state minimum-required GPA from 2.5 to 2.9, officials said.

Historically, a few hundred students have applied after the April 1 deadline, said Randy Richardson, vice president for undergraduate education.

"We do not want to have more students than we can serve," said Lynne Tronsdal, associate dean of the University College. "And in light of the budget cuts, we have to be careful."

Richardson expected that the increased out-of-state GPA requirement caused about 200 students who normally would have been accepted to be denied admission. Those out-of-state students are a key revenue source for the university, which, this year, is making about $80 million from non-resident tuition and $37.2 million from resident tuition.

But Richardson said the need to limit class size outweighed the loss in tuition dollars from those 200 students.

"We've needed to manage our size for a while, but the budget cuts were a real wake-up call to do something now," he said.

The state Legislature - which is spending much of its time debating an Indian gaming initiative - has taken few steps to deal with next year's budget, which leaves officials uncertain about how much money they will have to support the incoming class.

Gov. Jane Dee Hull has also proposed taking away more than $7 million that would have been allocated to deal with enrollment growth.

"We're all working on the unknown," Richardson said. "So serving students will be a little harder."

He especially expressed concern for Tier-One general education courses and foundation classes, including math, English and Spanish.

"These are areas we are trying to work on, and we're especially concentrating on service for the incoming freshmen," he said.

The Writing Center, which works closely with freshmen, is expecting to be able to offer services to everyone who needs them, but only if it isn't hit hard by additional budget cuts, said Ty Bouldin, associate director of the Writing Center