Holy Family School

IOWA CITY — Like an airline overselling a flight, the University of Iowa extended admission this year to several thousand more applicants than it could accommodate on campus in this fall’s freshman class.

While nearly every university overbooks each year, relying on sophisticated algorithms that predict just how many admitted students will probably go elsewhere, Iowa officials were surprised to learn this spring how far off they were in their math. This fall’s freshman class is likely to have more than 400 more students than last year’s, an unintended increase of about 10 percent, for a total of just over 4,500.

Though the university considers this a happy accident — much of the growth has come from outside Iowa, including from schools as far away as China and India, whose graduates typically pay triple the tuition of state residents — the looming flood of new students has left the university scrambling to figure out where they will sleep, and how to fit them into some of the most popular courses.

In anticipation of the students’ arrival, the university has been securing local apartment buildings and temporarily converting open dormitory lounges into private spaces that can accommodate as many as eight beds.

“It’s good-bad,” said Tom Rocklin, interim vice president for student services, who oversees much of student life outside the classroom. He described a high-level meeting in May where the enrollment figures were disclosed as “emergency in tone — not like our flood emergency, but more ‘We have to act now.’?“

“You want them here,” Mr. Rocklin added. “But we have to house these students. We have to ensure they have the classes they need.”

That Iowa has emerged as one of the nation’s more popular public universities this year is a function, in part, of its aggressive marketing in other states and abroad. Its tuition for out-of-state students — $23,700 this year — also makes it more affordable than many private colleges, particularly those that have scaled back scholarship offers in an unstable economy.

The University of Minnesota, in Minneapolis, the only Big 10 institution with a lower out-of-state tuition than Iowa’s, also saw a jump in out-of-state applicants this year. While Minnesota was more accurate than Iowa in predicting the size of its freshman class this fall, it overshot its target in 2006 by 230 students — another reminder that admissions often entails as much art as science, particularly in this economic climate.

Wayne Sigler, the longtime director of admissions at Minnesota, likens the task of estimating the right number of admission offers to extend, knowing that many will decline, to that of a captain’s steering a large ship.

“The science of it, our projection models, are really helpful so we can get in sight of land,” Mr. Sigler said. “Once we reach a critical point, we start inching up to the dock.”

“We don’t want to come in too low, because that has severe budget implications,” he added. “On the other hand, we don’t want to come in too high, because it impacts course availability and spaces in the dorms.”

Iowa definitely came in high this year — the equivalent of crashing that boat into the pier. While Iowa had intended to increase the size of its freshman class by about 500 — largely as a way to raise tuition revenue — its plan was to do so by about 100 students a year. In effect, it met its five-year projection in the first year.

To increase diversity at the university, and to offset state budget cuts with more tuition revenue, Iowa admissions officials traveled this year to China, South Korea and India in search of potential applicants. In recent years, more American universities have drawn full-paying students, many interested in business and engineering, from these countries.

What Iowa did not count on was that so many of the international students who applied for this fall’s freshman class (2,200, an increase of 15 percent over last year) would wind up coming (nearly 430 as of now, an increase of 68 percent over last year). Almost 350 incoming students are from China alone.

Over all, one of every 10 members of this year’s freshman class at Iowa will hail from outside the United States.

“I want to attend the business college and am interested in marketing,” a Chinese freshman, Danyang Xu, 18, said in an e-mail from her home in Zhejiang province. “I am looking forward to parties, proms and having a spare time job,” said Ms. Xu, who has friends attending Cornell, Rice and the University of Pittsburgh.