An enrollment boom that began more than a decade ago at UC San Diego has sped up, with a record 42,376 students now flooding a campus with four major construction projects underway and a massive housing village on the drawing board.
The university said enrollment grew by 370 students during the fall quarter, slightly more than the 300 forecast by Chancellor Pradeep Khosla. The school added only 121 a year earlier.
The numbers include undergraduate, graduate and professional students, as well as graduate professionals, who don’t receive state support. Most of the graduate professionals are pursuing specialized degrees in engineering, data sciences, public health, business and management.
UCSD also said there were 1,005 clinical residents this fall, which wouldpush the overall enrollment number to 43,381. However, the University of California Office of the President doesn’t include those figures for individual campuses.
Either way, the La Jolla campus is surging. The school’s fall enrollment has not dipped since 2012, when Khosla took charge of a school that then had about 29,000 students. He expects enrollment to hit 50,000 by early in the next decade.
The boom is part of a larger expansion of the University of California system, which has been under intense pressure by the public and lawmakers to provide greater access to the nine campuses that accept undergraduates. The system’s 10th school, UC San Francisco, only accepts graduate students.
A lot of that demand arises from the fact that larger numbers of Hispanic high school graduates in California are meeting the UCs’ admissions requirement.
Systemwide enrollment hit 294,309 in fall 2022, more than 61,000 higher than a decade earlier. Complete numbers for fall 2023 aren’t yet available.
Few schools on the West Coast have been growing as fast at UCSD, which has lots of space and the desire to expand. That has led to a campus housing shortage. More than 2,200 students were on waiting lists for housing when the fall quarter began, and few found a spot.
The university is in the process of building three large student villages that will collectively add 5,700 beds between early next year and late 2025. The construction has disrupted the flow of foot traffic in several areas on campus, making it harder to get around an already crowded school.
Khosla told the San Diego Union-Tribune over the summer that he’s considering building another campus village that could house as many as 6,000 students.
“The congestion has been especially bad near Library Walk, where the new Triton Center (student union) is being built,” said George Chi Loi Lo, president of Associated Students. “I’ve seen students crashing into each other on bikes. But dining services is able to meet the needs of students and new restaurants have opened. We’re getting good feedback.”
