SB 118, Budget Bill to Enable CA Student Enrollment to Proceed, Passes Legislature Unanimously

After hearings conducted by both the California state Assembly and Senate budget committees, SB 118, a budget trailer bill that will safeguard student enrollment at UC Berkeley and prevent student enrollment from being treated as a separate project under CEQA, passed the Legislature unanimously today.

SB 118 remedies the court-issued cap on UC Berkeley’s enrollment for this fall, while preserving the requirement that long-range development plans of California’s public higher education campuses be fully reviewed for their environmental impacts.

“Today, the Legislature acted unanimously and passed SB 118, upholding our longstanding priority to provide more students, not fewer, the life-changing benefit of higher education,” said Sen. Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley. “Students were never intended to be considered pollution. SB 118 ensures that California environmental law does not treat student enrollment differently than the any other activity in our UC, CSU, or Community College long-range development plans.”

SB 118 won approval in the state Assembly on a 69-0 vote, and passed the state Senate on a vote of 33-0. SB 118 goes into effect immediately.

SB 118 addresses the recent unprecedented court ruling that ordered UC Berkeley to slash enrollment this fall by more than 2,600 students. While existing law mandates public higher education campuses to conduct an environmental review under the California Environmental Quality Act on all aspects of a campus long-range development plan, including student enrollment, the court action in the UC Berkeley case ruled that student enrollment, by itself, is subject to CEQA.

Most importantly, SB 118 eliminates the need for UC Berkeley to slash enrollment this fall, by rendering unenforceable any current court injunction that orders a freeze or a reduction of student enrollment, including the injunction affecting UC Berkeley.

Under SB 118, California’s public college and university campuses will still have to conduct a CEQA review of their long-range development plans and the impacts of a campus’ planned overall population increase, including for its faculty, administrators, students and staff. But a campus would not have to do a CEQA review solely because of a student enrollment increase.

For years, it has been a longstanding policy of the Legislature to expand access to public higher education. In fact, over the years, enrollment increases at California public colleges and universities have been the direct result of budget actions taken by the state.

Update: 6:30 p.m., 3/14/22: Gov. Gavin Newsom signed SB 118.

Sen. Nancy Skinner represents the 9th Senate District, is chair of the Senate Budget Committee and vice chair of the Legislative Women’s Caucus.