Taking advantage of deep cuts in summer fees due to a $14-million systemwide subsidy from the state, UC students are signing up in droves for UCLA Summer Sessions, fueling what may be at least a 40%-to-50% jump in enrollment over last year.

"We are experiencing unprecedented interest and demand for our classes," said David Unruh, director of Summer Sessions. With a month to go before the first session, 7,000-plus UC students have already enrolled at $76 per unit for undergraduates. "A year ago, we thought, 'Gee, if we could just grow by 20%, that would be wonderful," he said. Students also are taking more units on average, 8.5 versus 7.5 units last year.

To meet the demand, planners filled empty seats in existing classes before adding new courses and sections. The result: courses have grown by only 10%, but enrollment has risen. Filling up quickly have been the lab-based courses and composition classes.

And there has been no shortage of faculty to teach, Unruh said. In fact, UCLA will have a larger proportion of ladder faculty teaching this summer than its sister campuses.

"Our intent is to build out what we can, to integrate summer study into the fabric of the campus, to change the student culture as best we can and to make summer study more attractive, more appealing and certainly cheaper," the director said. Administrators hope UCLA students will eventually come to expect to take summer courses at some time during their academic career.

To keep summer study from impacting a full slate of other programs on campus, academic, housing and facilities planners are coordinating their efforts. "We are working very hard to preserve existing programs, functions and services," Unruh noted.

To expand further, Summer Sessions is working with the engineering school and departments of psychology, English, political science, history and sociology to package courses specifically to give transfer students a head start in their majors. In fact, a limited number of incoming transfer students receive a $500 fee waiver if they enroll in specific courses toward their major.

Incentives of up to $500 are being offered to students who fell a course short of graduating this spring and seniors who are slated to graduate this fall if they take those missing courses in the summer.

"So we're trying to pull in both directions to get people to graduate in the summer," Unruh said.