The University just got a little more crowded.

This fall, enrollment numbers inched up higher than ever before, with 34,885 students choosing to come to the school.

The increased enrollment – up 2 percent from last fall’s 34,180 – is due in part to a growing college-aged population in the state.

As the number of 18-year-olds increases in Georgia, demand for the University also goes up, said Nancy McDuff, associate vice president for admissions and enrollment management.

“What we’ve been trying to do is to accommodate as much of the demand as we can for the University,” McDuff said in a phone interview last week.

Better retention rates are also a factor, she said. More students choosing to stay at the University from year to year can mean climbing enrollment numbers.

“We try to stay pretty close to what we were the previous year,” McDuff said, “but we’ve been creeping up a little bit every year.”

But some smaller campus entities actively recruited to get their numbers up.

The College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences – which added 189 students to its population – recruited heavily in the Atlanta area, trying to let potential students know that agriculture is not just about tractors and cows, said Scott Angle, dean of the college.

“There are not enough students being trained to work in agribusiness in the state,” Angle said. “So, we’ve got to increase our numbers in the college.”

Angle said he didn’t think a larger student body would put a dramatic strain on the school’s resources, though.

“Some of our classes are fairly small,” he said. “I don’t know that adding a few more students to each one, in all cases, will be a problem.”

However, that statement comes with a qualifier.

For now, some of the school’s classes are actually under-enrolled, but at some point, classes will have to stop growing, Angle said.

“But we’re not there yet,” he said. “We can grow a little larger before we start running into those problems.”

The Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources – which grew by 22 percent – also has room for more students.

“With these numbers right now, we can certainly sustain the type of learning environment we want to provide,” said Mike Clutter, dean of the school.

Clutter said Warnell would continue to focus on recruitment until it got to be fully enrolled.

But some campus departments aren’t so lucky.

Faculty losses in the English department, for example, have strained departmental resources, said Doug Anderson, English department head.

Since April, the department has lost seven tenured and tenure-track faculty – which means about 28 fewer classes can be offered, Anderson said.

“We’re in a bind,” he said. “We’re being asked to do as much, or more, with less.”

To address the losses, the English department is offering “double sections” of some classes next fall. Instead of keeping class sizes to the usual maximum of 38 students, a professor and a few graduate students will teach a larger class of about 70 or 80.

But these problems aren’t unique to the English department. The University has lost about 50 full-time professors since fiscal year 2002 – and the University administration is aware of the problem.

“We would like to be able to be in a position where we could hire new faculty,” said Arnett Mace, senior vice president for academic affairs and provost.

However, the economic climate is restricting the University’s hiring powers, Mace said.

“We have larger class sizes than what I would like to see,” he said. “And that’s something that we certainly need to work on for the future.”