UC-Berkeley Might Slash Enrollment Due to Conflict With Neighborhood Group Opposing Expansion
“We recognize the amount of heart, energy and intellect each student pours into their application, and today’s news is incredibly disappointing”
Protection for the environment is at the center of this conflict. Doesn’t Berkeley care about the environment?
Politico reports:
UC Berkeley may reject 5,100 qualified applicants due to housing feud
UC Berkeley administrators sent a letter to student applicants this week warning that a recent court order could force the university to slash its projected undergraduate admissions by more than 3,000 slots.
“We recognize the amount of heart, energy and intellect each student pours into their application, and today’s news is incredibly disappointing,” wrote Olufemi Ogundele, assistant vice chancellor and director of undergraduate admissions at UC Berkeley, in a letter posted on Twitter by a Berkeley city councilmember. “Please continue to consider Berkeley as we challenge the court ruling and continue to fight for everyone of these thousands of students who worked so hard for, and earned, a seat at UC Berkeley.”
The warning stems from a yearslong legal spat between a group of neighbors and the prestigious university over a campus expansion plan. On Thursday, a state appeals court upheld an August ruling in which a judge sided with the neighborhood group, ordering UC Berkeley to freeze its enrollment at 2020-21 levels. The judge had found that the university did not complete an adequate report on the environmental impacts of expanding enrollment, as required by state law.
UC Berkeley receives more than 100,000 thousand applications annually and typically offers admissions to 21,000 high school and transfer students for the fall semester. The university in a statement said that capping enrollment at 2020-21 levels, which dipped because of the pandemic, will force it to send 5,100 fewer admissions offers.
The admissions reduction will come solely from freshman and transfer students, as graduate offers have already gone out.
The court decision would reduce enrollment on the campus from 45,057 to 42,347 students. UC Berkeley argued in its appeal that the enrollment drop could mean $57 million in projected revenue losses, devastating its ability to provide financial aid and fund student services and building maintenance.
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In 2009, the Interior Department was required to perform an environmental impact study before relaxing personal-protection concealed-carry restrictions in national parks — an action that anyone of sound mind intuitively understood would have no appreciable environmental impact whatsoever.
Sauce for the goose, biyotches.
Keep up the good work, opposition.
No more people need to go to that cesspool of now fake freedom.
There are key facts imbedded in this story.
1) A large part of U Cal Berkeley’s financial aid comes from unrestricted funds. So unlike the well-endowed Ivy League, Cal is raising tuition on some students to subsidize other students.
2) The “unexpected cutback” is made on a need-blind basis. So we don’t know if the financial aid needs of the smaller group of admitted students will be the same as the original plan. We don’t know what the ratio of in-state vs. out-of-state (who pay a much higher tuition) will be.
3) One has to look at system wide effects. Will the 5,000 students go to other U of C campuses or to Cal State campuses or to Harvard or to tthe local community college.
4) This is a time-limited holding action. Before next year’s admissions, there will be an opportunity to appeal this decision and/or write an environmental impact statement to justify the higher (pre-COVID) enrollment levels.
I know that EIS can be expensive and painful, but they get done. LIE might want to read the EIS for Cornell’s Roosevelt Island campus or for the construction of its medical school dorm in Manhattan.
There’s not enough housing in the bay area anyway, also due to these types of NIMBYs. Extremely hypocritical leftists in the Bay Area. Flood the country with immigrants to increase the population when the population would naturally be declining, and then oppose any new construction around them needed to accommodate the larger population. This is the story in every leftist shithole and why people are fleeing those cities and driving prices up in places like Tennessee.