Lawmakers unveil rescue effort to help UC Berkeley avoid enrollment cuts after court battle

State Sen. Nancy Skinner (D-Berkeley), who heads the Senate Budget Committee, said several ideas to fix the problem were vetted, including setting a fall enrollment target for Berkeley above the court-ordered level.

But that ran into issues over the autonomy of the UC and judicial systems, she said, and would not address the broader possibility that the court ruling on enrollment could potentially be used to force reductions in the California State University and California Community Colleges systems.

So she came up with the plan to eliminate enrollment as a separate factor for environmental review under state law, since students are not the “sole environmental pollutant” among campus activities.

“As budget chair, I’ve been overseeing budgets that have increased funding to California’s higher education segments for this purpose of increasing enrollment for the last three years,” she said. “It is our objective to expand the opportunity for California students to get benefit from our public higher ed, and we wanted to make sure that we didn’t have a statute that was contrary to that objective.”

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