Popular UCs to cut nonresident enrollment
ing on instructors, financial aid or services for California students.
During a hearing in May, a UC official told a panel of state senators that reducing the portion of outofstate and international students would give the university system less money to fall back on in hard financial times.
“It’s another cushion for the university to ensure that we can maintain quality in difficult financial times,” Seija Virtanen, UC’s associate director over state budget negotiations, told senators.
But California has an unexpected budget windfall this year, and that nearly lØ6 billion surplus gave legislators leverage to offset the financial hit to UC campuses.
The budget deal legislators ironed out with Newsom calls for spending l59 million, over five academic years starting in 2022, to offset nonresident tuition the UC system is expected to forgo by losing ,500 nonresident students.
In 2011, less than 1Ø% of the students at UC Berkeley were nonresidents, compared with more than 23% in the 2020 school year. Similar surges took place on the UCLA and
San Diego campuses.
This isn’t the first attempt to limit nonresident enrollmentb In 201Ø, UC regents approved a policy to cap outofstate enrollment at 18% for five of its campuses, and set the cap at 201Ø2018 levels for UC Berkeley and three other campuses with higher portions of nonresidents.
The new policy aims to bring nonresident enrollment under the 18% cap at UC Berkeley, Los Angles and San Diego — campuses that typically have the most competitive admissions.
Legislators initially proposed to cap outofstate enrollment at 10% for all nine undergraduate campuses in the UC system. After protests from university administrators, they agreed to scale back the proposal to focus on the three most elite campuses in the system, and with the higher cap of 18%.
“This is a huge step in the right direction,” Ting said.
Ting said paying lower tuition to attend a quality university is one of the state’s best taxpayerfunded benefits for middleclass families. California students pay l1,312 annually in tuition and fees to attend UC Berkeley, while those from outside the state pay l,066.
Separately, the new budget deal also includes l180 million to increase instate enrollment in the UC and California State University systems by more than 15,000 students.