UC Berkeley must withhold thousands of admissions offers under high court ruling

The University of California, Berkeley, must cut enrollment by 3,000 students this coming fall after the California Supreme Court opted not to overturn a lower court’s ruling requiring the campus to freeze enrollment at 2020-21 levels, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

In order to reduce enrollment by that much, Berkeley will now withhold acceptance letters from about 5,000 incoming freshmen and transfers, the Chronicle reported.

The court voted 4-2 against lifting an enrollment freeze that was ordered by a judge in Alameda County. The ruling stems from a lawsuit brought by a Berkeley neighborhood group expressing concerns about the impact of enrollment growth at the campus on the area like the environment, housing and noise.

In Thursday’s ruling, two justices, Goodwin Liu and Joshua Groban, dissented. “California and our broader society stand to lose the contributions of leadership, innovation, and service that would otherwise accrue if several thousand students did not have to defer or forgo the benefit of a UC Berkeley education this fall,” they wrote, according to the Chronicle.