SAN MARCOS -- Declaring that the university is still in a growth mode, Cal State San Marcos officials said Wednesday that they will seek to increase enrollment more than other CSU campuses if the state budget deal rolled out this week gets approved.

The budget deal proposes to add 7,500 more students to the CSU system this academic year than had been expected. At the San Marcos campus, the deal could result in 200 to 300 more students starting classes in the spring semester. The deal would cut about in half the estimated 500 students who had been expected to be denied admission in 2004-05.

Before the deal was struck, the state university system was planning to cut enrollment by 5 percent, or 23,000 students. That would include reducing the size of the freshman class by 10 percent.

But a slash of that magnitude is being mitigated now by $40 million that would be restored to the Cal State system's $2.4 billion budget -- $33 million for enrollment growth and $7 million more to prepare mostly poor and minority students for college work.

The budget could get the governor's signature as early as the weekend.

In Sacramento, said Carol Bonomo, the legislative liaison for CSUSM, "Everybody is tired … nobody's happy with it at this point. They're saying, let's just do it, we've done the best we can."

She added, "Give it (the budget deal) a grade of C. It's not grade inflation, it's an honest grade. It's not an A, but it didn't flunk, either. There is access. The quality was never on the table to be compromised, and some of the access is restored."

At the Cal State headquarters in Long Beach, spokeswoman Colleen Bentley-Adler said the deal struck in Sacramento shows that the Legislature and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger are committed to access. She said the deal softens what had, up to now, looked to be a harder blow to the promise made four decades ago of a public higher education in California to all who qualified.

Cal State, which held off sending out letters of no vacancy to fully qualified applicants, will now send out notices to many that they can be admitted in the spring.

At the University of California, letters were sent to 5,800 qualified applicants telling them they could attend a UC campus only if they first went to a community college and then transferred.

"For this year," said Provost Robert Sheath, the chief academic officer at Cal State San Marcos, "we're certainly going to make access our number one criterion by opening up more (class) sections in the spring."

And in the years that follow, he said, Cal State San Marcos will seek to grow by more than the 2.5 percent called for systemwide in a so-called compact forged by Schwarzenegger and the heads of the state's two public university systems. "We think the central theme is that our campus still wants to make access our number one criterion," Sheath said.

That compact tied a 14 percent tuition hike for 2004-05 to the state's providing money through the 2010-11 academic year for the annual 2.5 percent growth in both the CSU and UC systems -- adding 8,000 students a year at CSU and 5,000 at UC. Officials have stated that the growth figure is a minimum that could be increased.

As for this fall, Cal State San Marcos is expecting to find nearly 7,700 students on the rolls, down only a fraction from enrollment in fall 2003, said CSUSM spokesman Rick Moore. A more certain number may be established Friday, when full payment for the fall semester comes due for all but freshmen and transfer students.

Officials said the university does not want the tuition hike to have a dramatic impact on enrollment. The increase effective in the fall adds $288 a year to an undergraduate's bill for the cost of instruction and brings the total mandatory fees at San Marcos to $2,702 a year, $158 below the average of the 23 CSU campuses.

Contact staff writer Bruce Kauffman at (760) 761-4410 or bkauffman@nctimes.com.