U. Iowa officials said it’s nearly inevitable class sizes will increase this fall even greater than last year, in part because of the record-breaking number of incoming freshmen.

To accommodate the influx of students, officials said, it’s highly likely they will need to add additional course sections, specifically in classes popular with freshmen.

Last year, because of budget cuts, the UI saw an average increase of two students per class, UI spokesman Tom Moore said.

And larger lectures went up around 20 students last year, President Sally Mason told The Daily Iowan in September 2009.

Moore said the university doesn’t know the exact increase in class size this fall because the count of the incoming freshman class will not become official until the university submits the number to the state Board of Regents 10 days after the first day of classes.

But Beth Ingram, the associate provost for undergraduate education, said the university is keeping tabs on trends in class registration in anticipation of needing more sections in some areas.

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“We’ve been monitoring class availability since early registration last April, and we not only think about overall class availability, we also think about availability in specific departments and specific sections of courses that are high-demand courses,” she said.

Ingram has put together a planning committee to manage all aspects of the anticipated increase in enrollment. In addition, the Academic Advising Center, departments in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and the Office of the Provost are monitoring classes as registration progresses, Pat Folsom, the director of the Academic Advising Center, wrote in an e-mail.

“We have been working as a team to ensure that the entering class has the courses to meet the needs of the fall 2010 entering class,” she said in the e-mail.

These efforts include securing sufficient classes in math and science for major requirements as well as required General Education Program courses mostly taken by freshmen, including rhetoric, language classes, and lower-division science classes with labs. Officials will also make sure to keep offering electives students like and find valuable, Folsom wrote in the e-mail.

The UI wants to focus on providing small, discussion-based classes, she said.

“In addition to building academic skills, small classes can help make a large university feel smaller by encouraging students to develop relationships with each other and the instructor,” she said.

Freshman seminars have seen the most definitive change in numbers so far, increasing from 100 last fall to 130 this upcoming academic year. Up until last year, Ingram said, the number of freshman seminars was much lower and remained relatively stable.

But with a higher demand and freshman seminars posing as a crucial part of the UI’s plan to increase its retention rate — the lowest in the Big Ten — the seminars increased dramatically in variety and number over the last two years.

Despite the changes coming to the university, both in terms of the number of classes offered and in class sizes, Ingram said she does not expect the students’ academic experience to be drastically altered.

“My sense is that the average student is not going to see a big change in the fall,” she said. “I think that classes are going to be available and, if class sizes go up, they aren’t going up so much that you’ll notice a huge difference.”