This post was written by Hatchet staff writers Sera Royal and Catherine Moran.

GW is close to capacity.

Provost Forrest Maltzman said at a Faculty Senate meeting Friday that the University has almost hit its enrollment cap on the Foggy Bottom Campus.

He said that 99.66 percent of the available spots for undergraduate and graduate students on Foggy Bottom are filled. With only 57 slots to spare, Maltzman said that GW “effectively landed a 747 on the curb.”

The enrollment cap is part of a 20-year agreement with D.C. that limits GW to 16,553 on-campus students. Officials must be creative about where they house new programs to avoid hitting the cap, Maltzman said.

In March, Maltzman said he would work with officials to expand off-campus and online opportunities to prevent GW from hitting its enrollment cap.

How the University counts students toward the enrollment numbers depends on how many credits the students earn on the Foggy Bottom Campus compared to how many they earn on other campuses or online, Maltzman said during the meeting. Undergraduate students who live on the Mount Vernon Campus do not count toward the limit.

Officials must be creative about where they house new programs to avoid hitting the cap, Maltzman said.

“The enrollment growth that’s occurring is largely online and off-campus and it’s clearly helping us manage towards the cap,” he said. “So it’s important as schools contemplate big new programs and stuff like that we think a lot about where it’s located.”