UC SAN DIEGO SEES DECLINE IN FRESHMEN APPLICATIONS

Campus experiencing a drop in interest from international students

After 20 years of explosive growth, the number of students seeking to enroll as freshmen this fall at UC San Diego has taken a slight dip for reasons that are not fully understood by the university.

The campus said it received 130,830 applications, a decline of 396 over the previous year. The change was especially noticeable because last year’s figure was almost 13,000 higher than it was for fall 2021.

The number of California residents seeking a spot for this fall increased by 584, to 84,910. And the number of out-of-state applicants rose by 173, to 23,951. But the number of international students fell by 1,153, to 21,969.

“The decline was primarily from our international students,” Jim Rawlins, associate vice chancellor for enrollment management, said in an email.

“There could be a number of reasons for this decline, and without speaking with students on why they may have decided not to apply to UC San Diego, we speculate there may be growing interest in attending colleges and universities in their home countries, geopolitical considerations, some on-going COVID-19 travel restrictions, etc.

“Again, this is speculation.” Rawlins added that, “Our goal is not to reach record numbers of applications, it’s to encourage students to see us as a possibility as a university where they can achieve their academic ambitions.”

The decline wasn’t entirely unexpected.

The number of international students enrolling in U.S. schools dropped by 15 percent in 2020-21 due to COVID-19 and political tensions between the U.S. and other countries, particularly China. Enrollment is now starting to recover.

And in 2021, the California Legislature told UCSD, UCLA and UC Berkeley to reduce the number of undergraduates it accepts from outside California to make more room for students who live here. Some lawmakers

accused the schools of favoring international students because they paid much higher tuition.

Despite this change, there was only a modest increase in the number of Californians who applied for a spot in UCSD’s class of 2023.

The drop in applications comes at a time when UCSD is struggling to handle growth. It has added about 14,000 students since 2010, pushing enrollment to roughly 43,000. Chancellor Pradeep Khosla said the number could reach 50,000 within a decade.

This has led to a big housing shortage.

In 2022, about 3,100 students ended up on a waiting list for campus housing. This forced many students to compete for lodging just off campus, where rents were — and still are —skyrocketing.

The school is racing to build campus housing to address the problem. Four residential towers that will be 20 stories or taller are in various stages of construction. UCSD also is preparing to build Ridgewalk West, a $460 million village that will house 2,000 students. And later this year, UCSD will go before University of California Regents to review plans for a village that would house 3,500 to 4,000 people.

Some students find the size and pace of the construction exhausting and welcome the tiny bit of slowdown that might arise from a drop in freshmen applicants.

“This could give us time to breathe and the time to build housing to improve the quality of life and to help more students live on campus,” said Sky Yang, president of Associated Students at UCSD.