CHICAGO (AP) – More than 300 applicants who were accepted to the University of Illinois at Chicago were shifted onto a waiting list after more students than expected said they wanted to attend as freshmen this fall.

UIC had 2,600 spaces in its freshman class, but almost 3,000 of the successful applicants replied to say they wanted to enroll, school spokesman Bill Burton said. The university wouldn’t say how many students were sent acceptance letters for the freshman class.

The university has been able to cut the waiting list from 335 students to 140 by finding admitted students who no longer planned to attend and by counseling students on the waiting list about other colleges that still have openings, Burton said.

Barrington High School senior Priynka Rajaram said she was devastated when she was wait-listed months after being accepted. She had applied to only one other college, and its admissions process was over by then.

“I was really worried,” said Rajaram, who has since been admitted to UIC. “I thought I wouldn’t be going to college for the whole year.”

Colleges routinely accept more students than they have space for, because they know many applicants – accepted at more than one place – will pick some other school in the end.

UIC has an enrollment of about 25,000, including 16,000 undergraduates. It received a record 13,600 applications this year, even though it moved up its deadline from April 1 to Jan. 15, Burton said.

Once school officials realized that they might have too many students wanting to attend, the university sent letters to accepted students urging them to send in their letter announcing their intent to enroll before the May 1 deadline, Burton said.

Higher education officials said it is rare that a school has to wait-list students who have already been admitted. But officials at several public universities in Illinois said their applications and enrollment figures are up this year, a trend partially attributed to the economy and an increase in the number of high school seniors.

Joan McEneany, associate director of admissions at Western Illinois University, said that estimating how many students will actually enroll is an “inexact science.”

She expects WIU will have about 150 more freshmen than its targeted class of approximately 1,980 students, but “we are going to be making space for them.”

The new class at the University of Illinois campus in Urbana-Champaign will be about 200 over the 7,085 spots allotted, but the campus will still accept those students, said Stan Henderson, UIUC’s admissions director. About two dozen students who accepted the school’s offer of admission after its May 1 deadline, however, were denied, he said.

At Northern Illinois University, officials received so many applications this year that they cut short the admissions process in January, months earlier than usual, said Bob Burk, director of admissions.

“We don’t like to cut off that soon, but it was what we had to do to protect ourselves and our students to make sure we can offer them the classes they need to graduate,” he said.

Despite ending enrollment early, NIU expects to have a freshman class slightly above its target of 3,000 students, Burk said.