Other goals, he said, are to boost the percentage of graduate students enrolled at UC San Diego to 25 percent or 30 percent, up from about 19 percent.

According to the 2012-13 Chronicle of Higher Education Almanac, federal R&D in FY 2010 was $593,016,000 at UC San Diego. The graduation rate within 150 percent of normal time at UC San Diego in 2010 was 86.1 percent. The University of California system had $104,434,511 in Licensing Revenue, FY 2010. Laptops are nearly ubiquitous on campus. UCLA had 6,249 international students, 2010-11. The number of Chinese students has more than doubled at U.S. colleges, 2005-09. The number of Chinese students in 2010-11 was 157,558, with a sharp increase in the number of undergraduate students. The number of enrolled students at UC San Diego in Fall 2000 was 20,197; the number was 29,176 in Fall 2010 — a 44.5 percent increase. In 2008, California drew 10,202 students from out-of-state, mostly from Washington, Texas and Oregon. At all public four-year colleges from 2001-02 to 2011-12 tuition and fees have risen 72 percent (on average). The rate of growth in tuition and fees far exceeded the rate of increase in faculty salaries over the past three decades.

The average academic salary at UC Berkeley and UCLA combined was $158,300. UC San Diego has a $3.4 billion budget, about $240 million of which comes directly from the state. If a ballot measure that would temporarily boost taxes fails to win voter support in November, the UC system faces a $250-million cut in state funding. That could cost UC San Diego about $35 million.

The market value of UC San Diego Foundation endowment as of June 30, 2011 was $378,506,156 (an increase of 20.6 percent over the previous year). The UC system has a $6,342,217,000 endowment, 2011. UC Berkeley Foundation has $1,054,800,000 endowment. UCLA Foundation has a $1,486,244,000 endowment. Two billion dollars is currently being spent on construction projects at UC San Diego alone.

Meanwhile, at Mira Mesa College in Oceanside, students were placed on waiting lists for 906 of 1,248 classes offered this fall. In all, more than half of the colleges’ 14,545 students taking for-credit courses were on a waiting list for at least one class. Systemwide, the number of class sections in public 2-year colleges in California decreased 24 percent from 2008-09 to 2011. UC Regent Dick Blum told me personally that Blum Investment Partners held $700,000,000 in for-profit colleges because “community colleges aren’t doing their job; besides, that was before I married Dianne.”

— Richard Thompson
Alumnus ‘83