By Amy Dipierro
Diego Lopez, a student in his last year at Cal State San Marcos, gives the north San Diego County campus high marks. The Army veteran likes his classes, feels the campus is generally well-managed and appreciates that at the school’s current size, “you can just chill, and relax, and not get too overwhelmed.”
But Lopez can tell the student body is expanding, especially at the start of the semester, when he has to navigate crowded parking lots.
“The parking lots are so full, so you have to make sure you get here early. And then just right across the street, you see all the construction being done,” he said. “You can definitely tell: This school is growing a lot, and it’s growing fast.”
The number of students at the suburban Cal State San Marcos campus has mushroomed over the past decade. It’s now home to 14,655 students, an almost 15% jump since 2015, among the sharpest increases of any Cal State campus in
that period.
But that is not the case across the 23 campuses of the California State University system. Overall system enrollment has settled at 2.7% lower than a decade ago after tumbling more deeply during the pandemic. And behind that number is a more complicated picture, with some individual campuses showing double-digit percent increases even as others have experienced big decreases.
While San Marcos students have raced to find parking in the first weeks of recent academic years, Sonoma State students in contrast can usually find dozens of empty spaces in the Bay Area school’s main parking lot. The campus has suffered the worst enrollment loss in the university system, contracting from 9,408 students in 2015 to 5,784 students in 2024.
Falling enrollment has prompted a period of tight finances at the Sonoma State campus. Tess Wilkinson, a fourth-year transfer student studying communications, said she saw fewer courses being offered. She suspects budget cuts are one reason why.
“I even noticed some professors that had regularly taught courses in my major were no longer on the course schedule at all,” she said. “Some courses were thrown together to accommodate abrupt faculty changes — and student engagement in my classes felt like it had decreased.”
The divergence between San Marcos and Sonoma shows how the enrollment challenge facing the nation’s largest university system defies a one-size-fits-all solution about how to serve students and where to spend money around the state.
The trend continued this fall, with enrollment up from the year before at 15 campuses and down at eight. That uneven distribution of new students is in part due to regional differences in population, the cost of living and labor markets.
Enrollment at community colleges, a major feeder into Cal State, also slipped during the pandemic, though student headcount has started to recover. Going forward, Cal State will have to grapple with a long-predicted decline in the number of recent high school graduates in California.
Starting this school year, Cal State also has reallocated funding to universities that exceeded enrollment targets or showed they have higher demand and away from those with dropping enrollments. Anticipated cuts in state funding because of overall state budget conditions may have additional ripple effects, even at campuses with flourishing student bodies.
Those stakes have not escaped the notice of campuses at both ends of the enrollment yo-yo. EdSource interviewed students, faculty and administrators at Sonoma State and Cal State San Marcos about how they think course offerings, student clubs, construction and, yes, parking are changing as their schools get bigger or smaller.
Sonoma State
An hour north of San Francisco, Sonoma State University celebrates its location on the edge of the Russian River Valley by naming its dorms for wine varietals and regions from Beaujolais to Zinfandel.
But wildfires have destroyed thousands of homes in this region of the state since 2017, a shock from which its population and already expensive housing market are still recovering. That has made it harder to recruit students from other parts of the state, who are a significant part of the student body, officials said. Sonoma State’s enrollment has slid almost 39% since 2015.
Collapsing enrollment over the decade slowed to a 1% dip this year. Still, the smaller student body has prompted a serious cash crunch. Sonoma State, which has a $130 million operating budget this school year, anticipates a $21 million budget deficit going into 2025-26.
“It’s pretty simplistic sort of math: We just don’t have enough students paying the tuition to fully cover all of the expenses we have,” Emily F. Cutrer, the university’s interim president, said at an Oct. 28 town hall to discuss Sonoma State’s budget forecast.
Cutrer said the university would have to add more than 3,000 students — a 52% increase over fall 2024 — to cover its current deficit, a goal she estimated is likely three or four years away. The loss of tuition and fee revenue is compounded by rising employee benefits costs, state funding cuts and an estimated $3.6 million that Cal State is expected to reallocate to other campuses.
Sonoma State’s struggles are a comedown from a campaign under then-President Ruben Armiñana to bill the university as a “public Ivy” – offering plush new facilities at a state university price – in the 1990s through 2010s. Armiñana’s critics charged that the strategy attracted a wealthier and whiter student body compared with the state’s other public universities.
Judy Sakaki succeeded Armiñana in 2016 with the explicit goal of making Sonoma State more accessible and less elitist. Sakaki’s 2022 resignation ushered in a period of leadership turnover; Cutrer is the third person to lead the university since then.
Tim Wandling, who chairs the English department and serves on the board of the California Faculty Association at Sonoma State, said he’s concerned about leadership instability on campus. He also worries that the university’s top brass “want to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on marketing blitzes and new programs, and what they really need to do is just downsize their administrative staff and focus on keeping the good faculty that they have, the good students they have.”
Sonoma State is not alone among Bay Area universities hurting for students. San Francisco State and Cal State East Bay are facing similar declines.
Sonoma State’s relative distance from major population centers has long encouraged admissions staff to look outside their own backyard for prospective students.
Sonoma currently draws 35% of its students from its home county, an additional 63% from elsewhere in California and 1.6% from out of state. University administrators and attendees speaking at the October town hall appeared to favor an all-of-the-above recruitment strategy.
Locally, the campus has struck guaranteed admissions deals with several of the region’s school districts and community colleges. And looking outside Sonoma State’s immediate region, the university is also recruiting in Southern California, looking at ways of retaining students it already has and bringing back students who do not immediately re-enroll each term.
