Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Non-resident enrollment will be capped at the University of California's Berkeley and Los Angeles campuses next year to address concerns that California students are being displaced, but the system also does not plan to admit more residents to any of its campuses unless it gets more state funding, university President Janet Napolitano said Tuesday.
Napolitano told lawmakers during a budget hearing in Sacramento that UCLA and UC Berkeley will not be allowed to increase the percentage of out-of-state and international undergraduates they enroll during the next academic year. Nonresidents made up 20 percent of the undergraduates at UCLA last fall and 23 percent at Berkeley during the last academic year.
"The two schools where the number of out-of-state students really rubs people raw are Berkeley and UCLA because they are in the highest demand," she said. "For the '15-'16 school year, we will maintain the current level of out-of-state enrollment with no such guarantee for the other campuses of the University of California."
The university has been admitting more students from outside California to generate revenue because those students pay much higher tuition — $35,070 compared with the $12,192 charged to residents. System-wide, their numbers have more than doubled in four years. Along with UCLA and Berkeley, nonresident enrollment also has increased rapidly at UC San Diego, where students from outside California accounted for one in five undergraduates in the fall.
The trend has emerged as a sticking point in negotiations over the university's budget. In November, Napolitano proposed raising tuition by 5 percent this fall and expanding undergraduate enrollment by 3,000 — one-third of the slots for Californians and two-thirds for students from abroad and out-of-state. Gov. Jerry Brown, however, has threatened to withhold about $120 million in state funds unless the university keeps both its tuition rates and non-resident enrollment flat.
With the March window for notifying prospective freshmen if they have been admitted now open and the funding issue unresolved, Napolitano said the university now plans not to add any news seats for Californians next year. The nine UC campuses that serve undergraduates had 161,230 in-state students enrolled last year, the most recent period for which statistics were available.
"In the past, we have admitted more California residents than we were funded for," she said. "We are not in a position to do that in the future."
Assembly Speaker Toni Atkins, who has proposed increasing nonresident tuition by $5,000 next year as a way of augmenting the university's budget so more in-state students could be accommodated, said she was frustrated by Napolitano's remarks, noting that the university still was planning to serve more out-of-state students, albeit not at UCLA or Berkeley. .
"Proposing a cap on out-of-state students at two UC campuses, while increasing out-of-state enrollment overall, does not solve the problem," Atkins said. "UC's job is to educate California students, not wait-list them."
Copyright © The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
