Prospective college freshmen won't have to rush to turn in their applications well before deadlines - in Florida at least.
On Tuesday, three Florida public universities - UF, Florida State University and the University of Central Florida - said they will not follow after some California state universities that moved up admissions deadlines for accepting freshman applications in response to state budget cuts.
Fresno State, part of the California State University system, stopped taking applications three weeks prior to its original deadline of Feb. 1, according to a recent article in The New York Times.
As soon as the Fresno State admissions office had enough applications to meet its target number of incoming freshman, it stopped accepting applications, according to the article.
UF spokesman Steve Orlando said there has been no mention of moving up UF's Nov. 1 application deadline because the university doesn't operate using admissions quotas.
"We want to make sure every student gets a fair chance by having their application looked at," he said.
There are other ways UF is dealing with massive state budget cuts, including decreasing the number of students accepted each year, Orlando said. UF will admit 1,000 fewer students a year over four years, from 2008 to 2012.
This year, he said, UF is aiming to accept about 6,600 incoming freshmen, but normally it receives about 28,000 applications a year.
Browning Brooks, the director of news and public affairs for FSU, also said there is no plan to move up its Feb. 2 application deadline.
"We accepted 1,000 fewer applicants in 2008 than in 2007 by design," she said. "This is how we are dealing with budget cuts, not by moving up our deadline."
Meanwhile, Chad Binette, the assistant director of news and information for UCF, said the university would not move up its May 1 deadline. Unlike UF and FSU, UCF has rolling admissions, which means applicants typically find out whether they were admitted shortly after submitting their application.
In 2007, UF ended its early decision program, following the lead of top-tier universities such as Harvard and Yale. However budget cuts were not a consideration in doing so, Orlando said.
"We felt early decision gave an unfair advantage to wealthier students," he said.
UF does not have any other plans to cut funding for admissions, he said.
