Never say your friendly neighborhood congressman is afraid to sweat.
To wit: Steve Israel, who represents Long Island in the U.S. House of Representatives, helping his daughter move into the University at Albany by lugging a combination refrigerator-and-microwave up three flights of stairs.
Israel, resting briefly on the second floor, said he is “now seeking an appropriation for an elevator for Anthony Hall.”
The seemingly endless haul was thousands of times Friday, as UAlbany welcomed 2,550 freshmen. And it will be repeated thousands of times more over the next several weeks, as the region's colleges and universities start class. New students finished moving into Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute earlier this week; over the weekend, students will hit the College of Saint Rose.
Israel's daughter, Carly, is entering the UAlbany business program. As she passed by dad in the hall, delivering the fridge, she was asked, ready to get rid of the parents?
“Yes,” she said, before correcting herself. “No.”
UAlbany's enrollment is up nearly 500 from last fall; the school benefited from more students accepting their invitations to enroll than expected. It joins several other Capital Region schools in posting higher-than-usual enrollments.
Union College expects 585 freshmen, nearly a record. Hudson Valley Community College and Skidmore College are expecting bumper crops. And at Albany Medical College, the 135 incoming students aren't a record, but the class composition is unusual: 63 percent of its entering students are women, up from 51 percent last year.
The bigger sizes threatened to make for some close quarters.
“There was a point this year where we were afraid we were going to have to stack them like cordwood, which would not make us, them or their parents happy,” said Dan Lundquist, Union's dean of admissions and financial aid. At one point, the Schenectady school offered volunteers a $1,500 incentive to move into triples.
Only a couple of triples were needed, though, as just 20 more students than expected ultimately enrolled.
Skidmore also had to add triples, said Mary Lou Bates, dean of admissions and financial aid at the Saratoga Springs college. Skidmore planned for 620 students this fall, but wound up with 700.
“It's going to be a full housing situation,” said Bates, who added that when admissions officials start planning for the class of 2010 come October, they may decide to cut next year's target enrollment.
The high enrollment is a recurring story statewide, said Abraham Lackman, president of the Commission on Independent Colleges and Universities, which represents private schools in the state. “New York state has become a hot destination for college students,” he said. “There's a lot of things going on both in terms of perception and of quality.”
The full beds mean not only that the state gets a big economic jolt — out-of-state students will spend $1.3 billion this year — but also that education will continue to be a big part of the upstate labor market.