LA Times Editorial on UC Overenrollment Monday, November 08, 2021
LA Times Editorial: UC is at the tipping point with overcrowding. Don’t let it become an education factory 11-8-21
During the decade before the COVID-19 pandemic, student satisfaction with a University of California education was slowly but steadily sliding downward. The biggest source of unhappiness: crowding, which often meant the inability to get into required courses, or even to get into a sought-after major. The crowding situation has only worsened. In September, the dean of undergraduate studies at UC Santa Barbara warned the campus president and other university leaders that a dire shortage of courses meant freshmen couldn’t always get even the minimum number of units they needed, let alone the courses they wanted or those that might be required for a future major. “The inescapable logic of this,” Dean Jeffrey Stopple wrote in an email obtained by the Santa Barbara Independent, “is that we are enrolling more students than we can educate on a four-year, three-quarter schedule. This is impacting our graduation rates, most notably for students for whom summer is too expensive.” Lack of housing is an issue at almost every campus. Environmental lawsuits targeted growth plans at both UC Berkeley and Santa Cruz. Some students at UC San Diego have resorted to forking over the money for hotel rooms if they can afford it, or living out of their cars if they can’t. The ugliest solution to overcrowding so far is UC Santa Barbara’s decision to go along with a billionaire donor’s design monstrosity: a dormitory that would house 4,500 students, almost all of them in tiny, windowless rooms. The future students of the school can only hope that the regents reject the dorm, or they might opt to live out of cars themselves, just to get the sunlight. At UCLA, the student newspaper reported last year on students buying and selling spots UCLA Faculty Association Blog: 4th Quarter 2021
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