UC Expansion Plan Criticized as Unneeded in State Analysis

In one of the strongest criticisms of the University of California’s expansion plans, the legislative analyst’s office said Wednesday that UC’s expected enrollment growth could be handled without building the three new campuses the university is planning.

“We don’t believe there is a justification” for the three campuses UC officials hope to open in the next decade, Stuart Marshall of the legislative analyst’s staff testified at a hearing of the Senate Education Committee.

Marshall said there is room for the 63,000 additional students UC is expecting by the year 2005 on existing campuses, especially at the under-utilized UC Riverside.

The analyst noted that UC already plans to house about two-thirds of the new students on existing campuses, leaving slightly more than 20,000 “unhoused” graduate and undergraduate students in the next 15 years.

If UC Riverside were to grow to an enrollment of 25,000 in that time, instead of the planned 15,000, Marshall said, half of the university’s anticipated excess capacity could be accommodated on the Southern California campus.

The legislative analyst’s office also believes that UC is planning on 6,000 more graduate and professional students than can realistically be expected in the next 15 years, Marshall said.

If that number is subtracted from the expected “unhoused” students, about 4,000 remain, the legislative analyst’s office believes, and these could be accommodated on the university’s seven other campuses.

“There is a need to start one new campus at most,” Marshall said, “but they could do it (the expansion) with slight over-enrollments on all the present campuses.”

Wednesday’s discussion, which took place before Senate Education Committee Chairman Gary K. Hart (D-Santa Barbara), the only committee member present, presaged a debate that will become increasingly heated in the state capital next year, as all three higher education segments--UC, the California State University and the campus community college system--all press their requests for new campuses.

William B. Baker, UC vice president for budget and university relations, replied that sending much of the new enrollment to Riverside would create undesirable strains on that campus.

“It becomes chaos when you grow too fast,” Baker said, citing the experience at UC Santa Barbara in the 1960s and ‘70s, when “people were milling about, with no place to go.”

“We don’t want to repeat that,” he said. “We think it would be a mistake.”

William R. Frazer, senior vice president for academic affairs, said that Riverside “already is growing more rapidly than any other campus” and that it would damage “academic quality” to grow faster.

He said the faculty would have to increase in size by 10% a year, forcing current faculty members to spend too much time recruiting new colleagues and leading to a decline in the “quality of the faculty recruited.”

UC Davis Chancellor Theodore L. Hullar said UC generally needs to increase its percentage of graduate and professional students from the current campus average of 18% to at least 20% in order to compete with the nation’s best research universities.

But Marshall noted that UC San Diego has built a reputation as one of the country’s best research universities, especially in several scientific areas, with a graduate enrollment of about 13% of the total number of students.

In addition to the three campuses UC is seeking, Cal State wants another five, in addition to the San Marcos campus in northern San Diego County that will open next year. Community college system officials estimate that they will need at least 16 new campuses by 2005, to go along with the 107 existing campuses, to accommodate estimated enrollment growth.