Increased enrollment in community colleges is an impending side effect of the current economic climate, UI Admissions Director Michael Barron told New York Times readers on Monday.

The question is one of the first Barron will answer this week about college admissions on a New York Times blog.

The blog, called The Choice, aims to show the issues surrounding the college admissions and aid process by having different top-level university officials answer reader-submitted questions each week.

Barron, who worked at the University of Texas-Austin before spending the past 20 years with UI admissions, said he still isn’t quite sure how the Times selected him, but he is honored to participate.

After inviting the head of the College Board and Harvard’s dean, Barron said, officials were looking for someone from a large public university.

“That’s a very impressive list of experts,” Barron said. “But working with admissions for 40 years, I’d like to think I know something about it.”

Barron, who is not being paid to blog, said he has been pleased with the reception so far, which included around 40 questions on Monday from teachers, parents, and various other officials concerned with the confusing college-admission standards.

Barron must weed that number down to just three or four questions a day that he would like to answer, which on his first day included the benefit of high-school honors classes and the difficulty of transferring credits.

The blog, which began last spring, satisfies a hungry market for those types of questions, said Jacques Steinberg, a New York Times education writer and author of The Gatekeepers: Inside the Admissions Process of a Premier College.

“There is a bewildering shortage of good, authoritative information out there,” said Steinberg, who is also hosts The Choice. “We strive to provide our readers with that.”

UI freshman Robert Maharry hadn’t read The Choice as of Monday, but he said he thinks a blog of its nature could be effective.

“I didn’t know how scholarship money was distributed coming out of high school,” he said. “The information wasn’t available to me, as far as I knew.”

Steinberg said he is “intimately” involved in choosing the weekly bloggers. He recently attended a convention of guidance counselors and other admission officials where he said Barron’s name popped up on numerous occasions.

“Basically, what I do is moderate the questions and send the results to Michael [Barron],” Steinberg said. “He has a lot of latitude with what he wants to answer, but his responses still go through a detailed filter process with the Times editors. He definitely knows how to meet a deadline, though.”

Steinberg said the blog’s main goal is to “cast as wide a net as possible,” providing simple, clear information about schools for applicants and parents.

Though he has received specific questions about the UI, Barron opted, at least for now, to answer questions covering a more universal spectrum.

The blog, appearing on the New York Times website, will feature Barron until Friday.