FULLERTON – Cal State Fullerton officials, yielding to pleas from community colleges, have agreed to accept a limited number of transfer students for the spring semester – but only at the El Toro campus.

Both California State University, Fullerton, and the University of California, Irvine, had shut off transfer enrollment for their spring terms because of budget cuts. That left few options for local community-college students who were hoping to move on and complete their degrees.

The action was expected to clog the pipeline at Orange County's two-year colleges, as students unable to transfer to four-year universities would remain behind to earn more credits, jamming classes that are already overenrolled.

"We would normally take in several thousand applications for upper-division transfer students for spring semester," said Ephraim Smith, CSUF's vice president for academic affairs, explaining why the campus decided to make room at its south-county campus. "We've been talking to the community colleges, and obviously they're very concerned."

The University of California announced Tuesday that it was returning the application fees of 1,500 transfer students who were not considered for spring admission, including 710 students who applied to UC Irvine.

Cal State Fullerton's change of heart was good news at Costa Mesa's Orange Coast College, which annually sends more than 700 upper- division students to the university.

"They are actually offering a pretty decent number of classes at El Toro," said Dan Weber, OCC's transfer office coordinator.

To be eligible, transfer students must apply online and agree to take all their coursework for spring semester at El Toro, officials said.

That would be a problem for Cypress College transfer student John Kim, who said he was admitted at the last minute to CSUF's fall semester.

"I'm not going to make that drive to El Toro," said Kim, who lives in Hawaiian Gardens. "It's bad enough coming (to Fullerton). If I didn't get in, I'd probably end up working and maybe straying away from school."

That is the concern of Irene Malmgren, dean of counseling at Santa Ana College. She said the college spent the past four or five weeks working hard to get its transfer-ready students into UCI, "because we felt that possibly the schools might close."

"The more you deter students, the more often you stall them, the greater chance they will fall away," she said. "If they have to wait nine months before they can go back to school, they have to get a job, they're off financial aid and creating bills."

Bob Deegan, vice president of student services at Santiago Canyon College in Orange, said he expects to see a long-term fallout from a shortage of classroom space at CSU and UC campuses statewide.

"With more students and less space at CSU, that backs things up and students are staying a little bit longer at community college," Deegan said. "At the same time, all the students coming out of high school and other students want to enter our doors. We never close until every single seat in every class is filled, so you have more students competing for a limited number of classes. It's a little tighter and a little harder."