With UC San Diego's campus population already exceeding projections made for a decade from now and further big increases expected, the university is updating its long-range development plan with an objective of creating more housing for students on the west end of the La Jolla campus.
The current plan, completed in 2018, was projected to take the campus through 2035. The revised plan would go through 2040.
The 2018 plan estimated the 2035 campus population at 65,600, including 42,400 students and 23,200 employees. The revised estimate, based on enrollment and staffing trends, projects a total of 96,300 students and employees by 2040.
However, UCSD's student enrollment already has reached 43,381 as of last fall, according to a campus profile on the university website, with roughly 40,000 employees, according to the University of California .
UCSD attributes the higher-than-projected growth to "demand for higher education and systemwide priorities to increase enrollment."
A key driver for the plan update is “expanding access to students seeking a high-quality education” in accord with priorities set by the state, the UC system and UC San Diego over the past decade, according to UCSD spokeswoman Leslie Sepuka.
“It requires ongoing investments in infrastructure, classroom space as well as faculty and staff to enhance the student experience,” she said.
In March, a scoping meeting was held to go over the update and take feedback from residents.
“The university is committed to increasing availability of housing for students,” Sepuka said. “The goal is to provide on-campus housing to up to 65 percent of all students and continue to make progress toward a four-year undergraduate housing guarantee at below market rates for comparable units.”
The campus currently houses a little more than 50 percent of its students with a two-year housing guarantee. Most of the student housing is on the west side, so proposed changes include building additional housing and replacing aging facilities.
The university projects a roughly 30 percent increase in new campus development, including more than 21 million square feet of new buildings on the west campus, a 5 million-square-foot increase from the 2018 plan. The revised plan also lists 567,000 square feet of development “nearby,” meaning not on campus.
No changes are proposed for the associated Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
UCSD says it already has added more than 11,000 new beds for student housing in the past 10 years, which it calls the largest such residential expansion in the country.
According to the university, the UC Board of Regents requires every campus in the UC system to have, and periodically update, a long-range development plan.
The plan “defines how a campus will accommodate anticipated enrollment and the faculty and staff needed to support it. A [long-range development plan] is only a guide; it does not commit the campus to specific projects, as it must provide flexibility for changing conditions.”
Not everyone is convinced the expected changes are good.
Though area resident David Lebowitz said he feels the university "does a tremendous amount of good in terms of its research output and providing so many Californians with a high-quality education ... I am also concerned about UC San Diego's record of failing to complete student housing projects on time, the impact on the student experience of living in an increasingly crowded environment that is a perpetual construction zone, and the impact on traffic from such a dramatic increase in campus population.”
“The growth in staff and faculty is likely more impactful from a traffic standpoint, as nearly all will be commuting," Lebowitz said. "The traffic impact from student growth is more difficult to predict and could depend in large part on how much on-campus student housing is actually built and what restrictions may be placed on student parking on campus.” ◆
This story originally appeared in La Jolla Light .
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