UC Board of Regents approved a $1 billion project to expand the Merced campus and an enrollment plan that will add 10,000 students throughout the UC system over the next three years at its meeting Thursday.
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Yet Oved joined all other regents in supporting the plan, he said, as a symbolic vote of confidence that UC President Janet Napolitano and other officials would do their best to manage the growth.
All nine UC campuses will have more California residents as students. “For students sleeping in cars at UC Santa Cruz, taking showers at the gym at UC San Francisco…an enrollment plan without new housing construction is a failure to acknowledge our housing crisis”, he said. The school is also asking for an extra $6 million from the state to allow 600 more graduate students to be enrolled in the 2016-17 school year and to increase graduate school enrollment for the following two years. That increase will be paid for by a state budget allocation of $25 million, with an additional $25 million provided by the university.
Student regent Avi Oved said he would vote for the plan, but he criticized it as a hasty political move that could devalue the quality of education at the university and failed to address issues of affordability that many current students are already struggling with.
Nathan Brostrom, UC chief financial officer, added details of how the increase in enrollment will be divided across campuses has not yet been established, but no campus will be excluded from the increase.
“Where are we going to put them?” he said.
The board said it intends to sustain the expanded access in the following two years, enrolling 2,500 additional California resident undergraduates in 2017-2018 and again in 2018-19, for a total increase of 10,000 students.
To balance its budget, UC also plans to phase out the tuition grants it gives to low-income students from other states – which, when fully implemented, would give UC about $36 million per year to spend elsewhere. “I think it’s fair to pose this question to the politicians in Sacramento, who pressured UC to dissolve nonresident financial aid to support this aggressive enrollment plan knowing this is beyond our capacity”. Much of the rest will be financed by borrowing and direct investment by the developer, officials said.
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UC Merced Chancellor Dorothy Leland said Thursday that the plan is “really about the future of the University of California and its ability to continue to provide access to the poorest region of the state and to an incredibly deserving and diverse population”.
