Berkeley enrolment cut set to go ahead after top court defeat

The University of California, Berkeley has lost a state Supreme Court appeal over student housing, dramatically raising the odds that it will need to sharply cut its expected on-campus freshman class this autumn.

The top court declined to overrule a state judge who sided with city residents waging a long-running legal fight against the university over students living in overcrowded off-campus conditions.

That leaves Berkeley, one of the most sought-after US college campuses, with few if any alternatives to cutting 2,500 to 3,000 seats from its classrooms this autumn only a couple of weeks before it announces the bulk of its annual admissions decisions.

“This is devastating news for the students who have worked so hard for and have earned an offer of a seat in our fall 2022 class,” Berkeley’s chancellor, Carol Christ, and interim provost, Catherine Koshland, say in a message to the campus community. “Our fight on behalf of every one of these students continues.”

The best possible remaining solution for the flagship campus in the biggest US state nevertheless looms as a long shot, believed to involve a Berkeley-specific revision of a major California environmental law that is likely to require two-thirds approvals in both chambers of the state legislature.

The environmental law is the basis of the successful legal claim by the Berkeley city residents, and past attempts to alter its applications to housing disputes have stalled. California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, and the speaker of the state Assembly, Anthony Rendon, both expressed concern for Berkeley but set out no specific strategy.

With that reality, Berkeley is working on a plan that would mitigate the lawsuit’s effects by sticking close to the number of admissions offers it had planned for the autumn but asking a large chunk of the new students – about 1,500 – to either defer their studies until the spring semester or begin their autumn semester in online classes.

“While these strategies will enable UC-Berkeley to make available as many enrolment seats as we can, the lower court order leaves us with options that are far from ideal,” Professor Christ and Professor Koshland say in their note to the campus.

Berkeley currently has more than 45,000 undergraduate and postgraduate students. But the state judge who sided with the community group suing the university used the campus’s autumn 2020 enrolment figure of 42,237 – a number depressed by the pandemic – as the baseline when ordering the institution not to exceed it.

After the judge’s ruling last month, Berkeley said it could meet that requirement only by cutting its expected autumn intake of 9,500 freshmen and transfer students down to 6,450. Campus leaders have since recalculated that figure, to take into account students already in off-campus and remote settings, and concluded that they can accept an amount closer to 7,000 new students.

The institution said that it hopes to cover most of the remaining gap with its idea of admissions that require deferrals or online classes. A few hundred students already given early admissions offers – primarily athletes or those with academic scholarships – will not have their terms affected, the university said.

A leader of the community opposition, Phil Bokovoy, has accused Berkeley of expanding its total student population from about 31,000 to beyond 45,000 since 2005, while adding only 1,600 beds to student housing.

That has left students living in off-campus rental units, often two to a bedroom, pushing many families out of the city, and creating excessive rubbish and noise for others, said Mr Bokovoy, a lawyer and Berkeley alumnus. In cases where Berkeley has built housing, he complained, it often has occurred at off-campus locations, hurting the city by converting low-housing units and creating more tax-exempt properties.

Mr Bokovoy said in media briefing that he was willing to explore suggestions from the court for a negotiated solution with Berkeley. But a Berkeley spokesperson, Dan Mogulof, said he was pessimistic about the chances of any breakthrough, given the institution’s years of past experiences with Mr Bokovoy and his group.

The university did reach an agreement last year with city leaders in which it agreed to pay more than $82 million (£61 million) over 16 years to offset municipal costs related to its operations.

paul.basken@timeshighereducation.com