Updated 4:00 p.m. March 6

Earlier versions of this story included outdated enrollment impact estimates, which were supplied by UC Berkeley officials to CalMatters. The story has been updated to reflect revised numbers from UC Berkeley, which indicate a less dire impact on new students than the university’s past statements and projections had suggested.

UC Berkeley will be able to enroll almost all the roughly 9,200 students it planned for this coming academic year, even though the California Supreme Court Thursday refused to strike down a lower court’s order that the university cut its campus enrollment.

“All the undergraduates we planned to enroll will be enrolled next year,” said Dan Mogulof, assistant vice chancellor of public affairs at UC Berkeley, during a phone interview with CalMatters Friday.

While the lower court said UC Berkeley must whittle down its campus enrollment by about 3,000 students, that still leaves room for new students to attend online in the fall or start their classes next spring, when the campus population declines as other students graduate early.

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By asking roughly 1,000 new students to take all their classes online in the fall and another 650 to begin their UC Berkeley educations in spring of 2023, the university won’t have to leave any students behind in the 2022-23 academic year.

Still, the campus will miss some enrollment targets. Because some of the 125 graduate school programs hadn’t yet sent out their admissions offers, the enrollment cap means 400 fewer new graduate students in engineering, business and law programs will attend the university next year, Mogulof said.

That’s a different degree of fallout than campus officials warned could happen. That UC Berkeley has to cut its campus population at all stems from Alameda Superior Court Judge Brad Seligman’s order last year to hold UC Berkeley’s enrollment at 2020-21 levels, after residents in the city of Berkeley sued the university, challenging the impact the school’s enrollment growth would have on city services, scarce local housing and noise.

The basis of that suit and court decisions, the 1970 California Environmental Quality Act, centers anew the state’s marquee environmental protection law as either a source of ire for backers of urban density and housing developers or as a chief weapon to preserve communities and the surrounding environments.

On Thursday, a statement from UC Berkeley said the state Supreme Court’s decision not to intervene “is devastating news for the thousands of students who have worked so hard for and have earned a seat in our fall 2022 class.”

A new press statement from Mogulof on Friday said, “[T]he harm caused by this court decision extends beyond the students who should be offered an in-person seat in our fall 2022 class. It impacts prospective students generally, our campus operations, and the university’s ability to serve students by meeting the enrollment targets set by the state.”

The decision wasn’t unanimous. In a dissenting statement, Justice Goodwin Liu wrote that he would have granted UC Berkeley’s request to block the enrollment cap. He urged the sides to try to quickly resolve the case.

On Thursday, Phil Bokovoy, president of Save Berkeley’s Neighborhoods, the group that brought the suit against UC Berkeley, said he was “pleased” with the Supreme Court’s decision but that “we’d like to assure deserving California high school students that we are as disappointed as they are that UC has tried to use them as pawns in UC’s attempts to avoid mitigating the impacts from the massive enrollment increases over the past few years.”

In response to Liu’s comments, Save Berkeley’s Neighborhoods proposed a compromise deal in a press release on Saturday, March 5. The group’s proposal would allow UC Berkeley to enroll a total of 43,347 students, instead of the 42,347 allowed under the Supreme Court’s ruling, but it would be conditional. The group would require that 90% of new undergraduates be California residents (in 2021, 73% of newly matriculated students were), and UC Berkeley would not be allowed to seek further legal action on this matter in the courts or state Legislature.

Mogulof told KQED that UC Berkeley officials take issue with the proposal.

“What this small group of litigants is asking for is authority to determine enrollment at the University of California, Berkeley,” Mogulof said. He went on to say, “Enrollment decisions of the universities should not be in the hands of a small group of private citizens who have no accountability and no expertise in this area.”

After telling CalMatters that all the undergraduates the university had planned to enroll will be able to attend, Mogulof emailed a short time later to clarify that most of, but not all, the students would be able to attend.

“None of this is exact,” he said. “These are all rounded numbers that fluctuate year to year. Yes, we usually hover around 9,500 new undergrads a year. ... This year, before the court ruling, we originally planned on on 9,310 … and now we’re looking at 9,144 plus an expanded wait list of 150 that will provide us with more flexibility in potentially enrolling additional students if, for example, there is a legislative fix.”

The question becomes where might those students who would have been admitted to Berkeley end up going.

Now those fears are largely neutralized because the enrollment cap isn’t reducing the total number of new students the university will be able to enroll this coming academic year. There’s still tumult for students and the university, though. For the 1,650 students who’ll have to start online or in the fall, the start of their academic careers “is going to look nothing like what they wanted and hoped for,” Mogulof said.

The campus has some wiggle room with the enrollment cap because the campus population typically goes down marginally in the spring as students graduate early or attend off-campus programs in cities like Sacramento and Washington, D.C.

For its new students starting this fall and in person, the university will also prioritize in-state students over students who don’t have residency in California. In the past few years, about a quarter of undergraduates have typically come from out of state. But UC Berkeley will aim to lower that ratio substantially for this year — just 9% of students, or 641, will be nonresidents, and the remaining 6,334 new students will be Californians. Overall, 7,171 of the new 9,144 undergraduates, about 79%, who are expected to enter next year will be Californians.

This follows a CalMatters analysis that the campus could find a way to enroll more Californians by excluding some out-of-state students.

UC Berkeley said Friday its in-person campus population has to go down by roughly 2,600 students, not the 3,000 it previously estimated.

Some lawmakers and legal scholars had previously said that if the state Supreme Court kept Seligman’s order in place, it would open the door for other communities to sue campuses for their enrollment growth.

“This is an enormous limit on what any UC school, any Cal State school, any public school system can do,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of UC Berkeley’s law school, in a conversation with CalMatters before the Supreme Court issued its decision Thursday.

Still, Thursday’s court decision wasn’t about the full merits of the case but instead was about Seligman’s decision to cap enrollment. A state court of appeals is expected to hear the full case later this year.

Lawmakers could try to fast-track a bill to exempt campus enrollment from the state’s environmental quality act, a lawmaker said last month. But UC Berkeley is supposed to inform students by March 24 whether they’re admitted and some were already informed Feb. 11. Meanwhile, May 1 is the deadline for students to put down deposits to attend the campus — and the typical deadline for colleges across the country.

Lawmakers “don’t need much time to put that together,” texted Assemblymember Kevin McCarty, a Democrat from Sacramento. “We’re on the case and aware of the deadlines.”

Such a law would be a “missed opportunity,” said UC Davis law professor Chris Elmendorf, because it wouldn’t address what he says is the environmental act’s major flaw: It views population growth of any kind as pollution in urban settings.

UC Berkeley’s student government implored the state Legislature today to exempt campus enrollment from the environmental act’s restrictions. In the past, Berkeley students were critical of the university’s housing plans because they threatened to displace lower-income city residents. The campus has already demolished an eight-unit rent-controlled building to make room for a new student housing complex. The students fear less revenue from fewer students will make it harder for the campus to meet its student housing goals.

But the act’s backers say it protects communities from pollution and is unfairly pilloried by public agencies and developers who want to build housing.

UC Berkeley argued in court filings that if it could not enroll the 3,000 students previously expected to be excluded this fall, it would lose out on $57 million in annual tuition payments for at least four years. The actual hit to UC’s bottom line will be much less now that it can enroll almost every student it sought for this coming fall. The students starting in the spring and the lower number of graduate students will lead to revenue declines.

Though the current lawsuit technically concerns a housing and academic development for the Goldman School of Public Policy, the larger issue is whether UC Berkeley failed to adequately measure the impact its enrollment growth would have on the city.

Berkeley said in its 2005 multiyear construction plan that its 2020 enrollment would be around 33,000 students. But the campus actually hit nearly 43,000 students in the fall of 2020. While the campus far exceeded its enrollment caps, UC Berkeley built fewer housing slots for students than it had anticipated. By 2020 the campus said it would have 10,790 beds but to date can house just 9,800 students.

The lawsuit brought forth by Save Berkeley’s Neighborhoods argues UC Berkeley never did a proper assessment of how that added enrollment growth affects the surrounding area. And without that analysis, the campus can’t proceed with any other construction plan.

Seligman agreed. And the state Supreme Court agreed with him.

UC Berkeley contends budget shortfalls caused by the Great Recession and declining state support for much of that period meant less money to invest in student housing. The campus also spent “a significant amount of its housing reserves to seismically retrofit three of our existing residential facilities,” said Mogulof, the UC Berkeley spokesperson. And, he said, while the campus had identified land for as many as 5,000 beds in a 2017 report, those properties already included existing structures like parking lots and academic buildings that would have to be torn down.

Lawmakers in the past year have proposed or approved $7 billion in campus housing loans and grants.

Other legal scholars say enrollment growth isn’t an issue that’s relevant to the case. “The trial court’s ruling was wrong on many levels. The court had no jurisdiction in deciding the Goldman School case to impose limits on Berkeley’s student population; that was simply not at issue,” wrote Chemerinsky in a Sacramento Bee essay.

Public officials, most prominently Gov. Gavin Newsom, said students will be locked out of an elite education. Denying enrollment at UC Berkeley “would be irreparably damaging” and “also undermine the State’s broad interest in expanding access to higher education, especially at the State’s flagship undergraduate institutions,” Newsom’s brief to the state Supreme Court said.

But public data suggests nearly all UC Berkeley applicants admitted as first-year students end up at a college.

In 2019, just 5%, or 656, of UC Berkeley’s admitted freshmen didn’t attend a college, or their college destinations were unknown. Nearly half — 45% — who were admitted ended up attending the university. The remaining half largely made their way to strong institutions, including 16% to other UCs and 24% to selective private universities that typically have strong financial aid packages for students with lower incomes.

Still, those stats apply to a normal year, not when a large campus like UC Berkeley is unable to enroll the 3,000 new freshmen and transfer students officials previously feared would lose a spot. Given the popularity of the whole UC system, other campuses within the system would have struggled to accommodate those students, which could have affected enrollment capacity at other public and private colleges.

Bokovoy, of Save Berkeley’s Neighborhoods, pointed out during a Zoom press conference following the state Supreme Court’s decision that in the past decade, the percentage of students receiving the federal Pell grant intended for students with lower incomes dropped from 33% to 27% at UC Berkeley. He argued high rents in the community and insufficient student housing have pushed students with lower incomes out.

Previously, Bokovoy wrote in an email that the group “would like a legally binding agreement that ties enrollment growth to the production of housing on land UC already owns” — which would mean the campus can’t add more students until it builds more housing. In past conversations, he cited the 2008 legal settlement between UC Santa Cruz and local government that tied campus enrollment growth to more housing as a model for what UC Berkeley could pursue. But that deal also came with an enrollment cap of 19,500 students for what ended up being 15 years. At the time of the deal, UC Santa Cruz’s enrollment was around 16,000 students.

Several times Bokovoy denied a UC Berkeley claim that he is pushing for an enrollment cap.

UC Berkeley won’t agree to any enrollment cap, Mogulof said. The campus struck a deal last year with the city of Berkeley that it will pay the city $4 million a year regardless of whether the campus reaches its housing production goals. The city was an initial plaintiff in the lawsuit against UC Berkeley but settled with the campus before Seligman issued his enrollment cap. The city never sought an enrollment cap; in fact, its legal team wrote to the state Supreme Court in a request to side with the UC campus and lift the enrollment cap.

Another campus, UC Davis, made a promise to tie enrollment growth to more housing but the penalty for missing its targets is $500 per bed, according to a legal deal it made with the local government.

Bokovoy said UC Berkeley could expand its campus elsewhere in the Bay Area and not in the city of Berkeley, such as in nearby Richmond. Early plans for a satellite campus there fell through in 2016.

Going forward, if community groups target other campuses for their enrollment growth, those lawsuits may be short-lived if the court of appeals overturns Seligman’s ruling once it hears the full UC Berkeley case later this year.

Chemerinsky, the UC Berkeley law school dean, said the UC Berkeley case introduces larger questions about the state’s main environmental law at the center of the lawsuit and the role courts play in university affairs.

“There’s a real question of how much do we want the courts in the name of [the environmental law] to be controlling enrollment in the UC system,” he said.

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KQED's Haley Gray contributed to this report.

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