Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College was abuzz Monday as students scurried to make it to the first classes of the 2008 fall semester.

Dr. David Bridges, the college’s president, said it was one of the largest freshman classes in the history of the college. Freshman students participated in five days of Welcome Week activities last week and ABAC Place and the new ABAC Lakeside complex are full with almost 1,300 students making the dorms their homes.

Bridges said Welcome Week was “the best the campus has ever had” and that some of those students stayed in Tifton over the weekend awaiting the first day of classes Monday.

ABAC’s future will involve students who are earning bachelor’s degrees on the campus. The college offers four-year degrees in diversified agriculture and turfgrass and golf course management. In cooperation with Georgia Southwestern State University, bachelor’s degrees are now available in early childhood education, resource management, accounting and management.

“It’s important that we grow the number of upper class men and we believe we have done that this fall,” Bridges said.

Enrollment numbers had not been finalized Monday and should be available soon.

Bridges said he believes students choose ABAC because it remains a “small, caring school” and the class sizes are small.

“There are a lot of students from rural places of the state who want to continue their rural environment and there are a lot of students in the metropolitan areas of the state who would like to have the rural experience,” Bridges said.

Bridges said that the recent decision to discontinue the college’s student basketball programs was the toughest he’s been faced with since he took the position of president. He said he played basketball in high. He said the decision was based on economics and that “trying to support eight sports teams was proving to be a very difficult thing to do.”

Bridges said that when both the women’s and men’s basketball coaches resigned in May, he and others already knew of the state’s economic woes but decided to go ahead and hire two coaches for the program and that is when the state announced funding cutbacks. He said that announcement was “the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

“Not a person who was involved wanted to do it,” Bridges said.

Bridges said that future news reports will probably include other colleges laying off instructors and having to cut travel expenses even deeper.

“All of our people are still employed and still drawing a paycheck,” Bridges commented.

Bridges said it wasn’t the first time the women’s basketball program had been cut and then reestablished and that the time might come in the future that the programs would be re-established.