The school budget includes $4.3 billion in capital expenses, but that figure was based on projections completed several years ago, before the new enrollment surge.

The enrollment surge has also continued in Fairfield, where officials are scrambling to reopen elementary schools that were closed in the 1970's, and to build classroom additions at its middle schools.

The rapid increase of the Nicaraguan population in 1989 forced one major hospital here to write off more than $5 million dollars in health care bills and also led to an enrollment surge in the Dade County public school system.

To the Editor: Re "Women's Colleges Find a New Popularity" (front page, Jan. 15): Two other drivers of the enrollment surge at women's colleges are adult women and women of color.

In the Hampton Bays school district, J. Bruce McKenna, the superintendent, said Hispanic students were a factor in a recent enrollment surge.

The result, according to a new study by the Harvard University higher-education expert, David W. Breneman, leaves the California system in a state of emergency and ill prepared to meet an expected enrollment surge of nearly half a million students over the next decade.

As is often the case in troubled economic times, business schools reported an enrollment surge in 2002.

Districts are not relying on short-term strategies to meet the challenge of the enrollment surge, which could cause potential problems in the future when there are fewer students in the schools.

Joe Popovich, a researcher who worked on the report, said the decline in degrees received by men in general might in part reflect the end of an enrollment surge in the mid-1970's, when Federal educational funds for veterans were widely available under the G.I. Bill of Rights.