As the economy spirals downward, community colleges face what one president calls "a tsunami of students" that many institutions don't have space to accommodate, especially at peak times and in high-demand programs. Colleges are scrambling to respond--by scheduling courses whenever they have empty classrooms, including early mornings and weekends, and by adding online course sections. Even so, many students find that the classes they want to take are full. At LaGuardia Community College, in New York, enrollment of first-time freshmen for the spring semester was a striking 18 percent higher than it was last year. "I'm going to have a damned time trying to find spaces to put them in," says the president, Gail O. Mellow, who says the 50,000-student institution is already using its classrooms Friday nights and all day Saturdays and Sundays. She has started scheduling 6 a.m. courses because that's a time when the college's scheduling grid shows empty rooms. The demand is driven in part by people who need retraining because they have lost their jobs--or fear losing them--and in part by recent high-school graduates who turn to community colleges because they can't afford state or private colleges. Enrollment caps at budget-stressed state institutions have also led more students to community colleges.