UC Berkeley might have to reduce its class size for 2022-23. If you applied this year to UC Berkeley, there is a good chance you will get or have already gotten a very scary-looking letter that might look something like this:
We know it looks scary, but if you get one don’t freak out. It doesn’t mean you aren’t going to get in. UC Berkeley is in a strange position right now and if you recently applied there, it’s worth understanding it. We wanted to keep you in the loop so here is what you need to know.
The University has released a statement about a court ruling from the California 1st District Court of Appeal. The court upheld a decision from a lower court that UC Berkeley had to freeze student enrollment at 42,347 which is the same level as 2020-21.
Ok, you might be saying, but what does that mean? Well, the TLDR is that UC Berkeley is probably going to have to admit fewer undergraduate students in 2022-23 than they had originally planned. They had said it might be around 3,000 fewer, but we will get back to that. The next question you have is probably, why? That’s a bigger question.
The easy answer is UC Berkley has been getting bigger and a local community group called Save Berkeley’s Neighborhoods has been trying to get the UC school to stop expanding as it will affect housing prices and environmental concerns in the already expensive Bay Area Town. UC Berkeley is trying to reverse the court's decision citing that 2020-21 was a low enrollment year due to the pandemic and they are planning on fighting the court’s decision.
The heart of the issue on both sides is, how big can UC Berkeley be? There isn’t a simple answer to this, but we can look at some past numbers to see how the university has been growing.
For 2021-2022, UC Berkley admitted 16,299 freshmen. In 2020, they admitted 15,461 and the year before (2019) they admitted 13,558 freshman. So yes, Berkeley has been expanding their admission offers every year. However these numbers have fluctuate to some extent, for example in 2017, they offered 15,500 freshmen admission.
While the news is reporting that Berkeley might have cut 3,000 in admissions, that number seems a bit high. If they are keeping with the trends, this number should be closer to 2,000 in admissions not 3,000. 3,000 may be correct, but it also might be a bit inflated in order to help sway opinion given they are still fighting the courts decision.
However, it is true that Berkeley has been growing more rapidly in recent years. Let’s look at some numbers from a couple years ago. Pre the 2010s, Berkeley wasn’t growing as rapidly as it is now.
There has been some ups and downs. For example, in 2014 a policy change around how they used their waitlist to round out the class shows in the total admitted Freshman. However, overall, we are seeing steady growth.
So should you be worried about Berkeley taking less students? Well yes and no. Obviously taking less students does push down their acceptance rate, but after looking at the numbers, we think that UC Berkeley isn’t in as bad fo a place than they might be saying they are.
We will keep watching this story. If UC Berkeley get’s their way, this decision will get over turned before students are notified. While the decision has been confirmed by two courts, there is still a lot that can happen before the end of March when their admissions are supposed to come out.
Want help getting into Berkeley? You can contact us here.