Cal admits the fewest students it has in years

After a tumultuous year of lawsuits and legislation over campus growth, the University of California’s flagship Berkeley campus admitted the lowest number of first-year students in recent years.

Cal offered admission to 14,600 new students for the fall semester, which begins next week. That compares with 16,400 admissions issued in 2021’s fall semester — and is the lowest number of potential new students since 2018, when 13,559 students were offered the chance to enroll in their first year. How many students actually enroll won’t be known until late fall.

Despite the legal and legislative battle over Cal’s plans to expand its campus, university officials said the reason for the reduced number of admittance offers was a result of standard enrollment planning, designed to keep enrollment stable.

Since enrollment surged unexpectedly last fall, when a higher than anticipated number of first-year and transfer students accepted admission offers, Cal officials reduced the number of students it would admit this fall. The lower numbers also anticipated a number of students returning to campus after taking a hiatus during the pandemic, university officials said.

The number of admission offers would have been much lower, UC administrators said, had the state Legislature not acted to protect Cal from a court order that would have required the university to sharply reduce admissions to meet an enrollment cap. The court order would have forced Cal to reduce the number of admission offers by 5,000.

But state legislators intervened, and passed a law nullifying the enrollment cap and saved Cal’s admissions for the fall.

Berkeley remained a popular campus for applicants, and a difficult one to gain admission to. More than 128,000 students applied for admission as first-year students — and just 11.4% were offered the chance to attend. That rate was down from 14% in 2021.

According to Cal officials, the fall first-year class remains diverse.

“Throughout the challenges of this past year, our commitment to diversity and providing economic mobility did not waiver. It was fortified.” said Olufemi Ogundele, UC Berkeley’s associate vice chancellor of enrollment management and dean of undergraduate admissions, in a statement.

While the numbers of admission offers declined in all racial categories because of the reduced number of offers compared with the prior three years, the university said the percentage of Black, Latino and Native American students admitted remained comparable.

Of those admitted to Cal, 39% were Asian, 24.5% Latino, 22.3% white, 5.5% Black, 3.5% Filipino and 0.8% Native American.

Geographically, the incoming class comes from 53 of California’s 58 counties, 55 U.S. states and territories, and 88 countries. Roughly 60% of the admitted class identify as women, and 2% identify as nonbinary — double the number last fall. About 20% of admitted students are first-generation college attendees.

The nine campus UC system admitted a record number of 85,250 first-year students.

Michael Cabanatuan (he/him) is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: mcabanatuan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @ctuan