UC enrollment increases are terrifying. Where will students live? Who will teach them? | Opinion

The University of California has just admitted what it says is its “largest and most diverse” class of students ever. This sounds positive — more Californians are gaining access to higher education, especially first generation and low-income students as well as individuals from underrepresented backgrounds.

But as a UC faculty member, I reacted with despair. Where will these students live? Who will teach them? Who will advise them? How will they get the classes they need? Who will support their physical and mental health?

The UC system has reached a critical breaking point. I’ve never seen anything like the demoralization or exhaustion that now permeates our campuses. It shouldn’t be like this. Our students — and the people of California — deserve better. Students are paying more and more, only to receive less and less for their money. We live in the era of the diminished degree.

I am the proud product of the UC system and I am extraordinarily grateful to be a faculty member at one. I earned my PhD at Berkeley, and am now a professor at UC Santa Barbara. I know first-hand how transformative the UC can be in people’s lives, and I strongly believe in its core principles, articulated in the state’s 1960 master plan, to pursue excellence in research and teaching while making higher education accessible to all.

That ethos remains strong among faculty, but it is not enough to sustain the system.

Opinion

Year after year, the UC enrolls more students than ever before. This is on top of the enrollment “surges” of prior years. Funding, however, has not kept pace. Since 1990, state contributions have declined by 38%, while enrollment has grown by 47%. The consequence? Students receive a lot less than they used to.

At UC Berkeley, for example, the faculty to student ratio rose from 18-1 to 30-1 between 1990 and 2020, and many students are taking longer to earn their degrees because they can’t get into the classes they need. As someone who regularly teaches large classes — sometimes over 500 students with long waitlists — it is impossible for me to provide students with the focused attention so many need to reach their full academic potential, let alone do so while also fulfilling research and administrative requirements.

Our facilities also show signs of decades of deferred maintenance. The Berkeley Faculty Association recently described campus infrastructure as “collapsing.” Many buildings are in urgent need of costly seismic retrofitting and asbestos remediation. Classrooms are dirty and lack adequate furnishings. And lab facilities are regularly under-equipped. Sister campuses are in similarly poor condition. My own experience is representative: none of the offices I have occupied on a UC campus has had working heat.

Similarly, housing shortages have plagued the system, and viable solutions to the problem have been slow to materialize. My home campus became the subject of ridicule for its plan to build “dormzilla,” a windowless behemoth with 4,500 beds. The well-deserved outrage over the safety hazards of the design ultimately doomed the project for good. After millions of dollars were spent on architects and the construction of a model of the design, we have fallen farther behind in our obligation to build new housing units. In the meantime, students, staff, and faculty alike continue to compete for the same limited — and exorbitantly priced — housing in the area.

It would be easy to blame campus spending for the UC’s budgetary crisis, such as the new labor contract with graduate student employees. But these are red herrings that detract from the structural problems we face. It would have been far cheaper, for instance, to invest in the construction of student housing than it is now to pay our students a salary that keeps up with cost of living increases. In other words, demands for higher pay are a symptom of a crumbling system — not its cause.

None of this is new; many have been sounding the alarm about disinvestment for decades. But the level of the crisis is dire. It is increasingly painful to experience the systematic hollowing out of an institution I know can provide so much to so many. Parents and students expressed frustration and heartbreak when they felt too few Californians were admitted into the UC because they know how valuable a UC education is. And even though studies show that for every dollar the state invests in us, we give back $21 to the state, along with $12 billion in tax revenue, we remain chronically underfunded.

The UC was once considered the best university system in the world, and our master plan became the gold standard for higher education. But we’re a shell of our former selves, and that’s exactly what awaits the record number of new admits that will join the UC in the fall.

Giuliana Perrone is an associate professor of history at UC Santa Barbara and a public voices fellow of the Op-Ed Project.