San Diego State University and Cal State San Marcos are bracing for record enrollment this week as they begin the fall semester, a moment that arrives with many California schools still struggling to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic.
SDSU estimates that enrollment will hit 40,500, solidifying its status as one of the state’s biggest universities. Plans call for increasing that number to 50,000.
CSUSM, its much younger sibling, will reach 15,300 — a figure that could approach 20,000 in five years.
“We need another building in almost every subject,” said Ellen Neufeldt, CSUSM’s president.
The schools are coping with the growth by creating housing for about 6,700 students and building large science centers. The two schools are also preparing to introduce bachelor’s degree courses in South County, which doesn’t have a full-service university. It’s possible that the push, over time, will lead to the creation of sizable satellite campuses.
The surge has generated a sense of pride and joy that’s being tempered by deep anxiety.
Cal State San Marcos presence in San Marcos includes a major education center and student housing in the emerging North City housing, entertainment, and dining district in the lower half of this photo to the school’s main campus across East Barham Drive. (Nelvin C. Cepeda / The San Diego Union-Tribune)
The Trump administration has canceled, reduced and delayed billions of dollars in university research funding nationwide since early this year, with no end in sight.
CSUSM, which yearns to become a science power, was an outlier, increasing its government funding by $1.7 million. But SDSU’s grants dropped by nearly $29 million.
It was a gut punch for the campus, which in April achieved a long-standing goal of being classified a Research 1 school by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching — joining the most elite category for science-heavy schools, a list that includes MIT and UC San Diego.
Like most university leaders nationwide, SDSU President Adela de la Torre hasn’t publicly confronted the Trump administration about the cuts. Instead, she and Neufeldt are focused on expanding their campuses in a volatile, expensive and confusing education market.
California’s community colleges, collectively a big feeder to California State University schools, started losing enrollment in 2018, and the decline accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Many CSU campuses began to rebound by last year. But many have fared poorly, particularly in Northern California, where the overall population drop was greater than in Southern California.
San Francisco State University has 4,718 fewer students today than it did in 2020, in a city that has lost more than 30,000 residents over the past five years.
But the precise reasons for SFSU’s problems — and for other CSU campuses’ — aren’t clear.
“Anybody who tells you they know why is probably not being honest, because I don’t think we know entirely,” said South County Assemblymember David Alvarez, a member of the Assembly Budget Subcommittee on Education Finance.
The problems don’t end there.
By 2033, the number of California students graduating from high school each year is expected to have fallen by more than half a million in just a decade, mostly due to declining birth rates, says the California Department of Finance. That could lead to a smaller pool of students seeking to enter college.
At a glance, that doesn’t seem to be a problem at SDSU and CSUSM.
SDSU’s new Evolve Student Housing project will be built over several phases and will increase the number of beds on campus to more than 13,300. (Rendering courtesy of SDSU)
SDSU is a 128-year-old, nationally known school that received a record 123,000 applications from students wanting to enroll this fall. Still, the university accepted only about 38% of them — partly because it still needs more classrooms, laboratories and housing, which are coming.
“If we were to open the spigot, we would get a lot more students,” de la Torre told The San Diego Union-Tribune.
Last month, the San Diego Community College District announced it wants to build a 100,000-square-foot, five-story academic center on SDSU’s new Mission Valley campus so that its students can study STEM subjects in a university environment. The hope is that they’d eventually become SDSU students, going on to earn advanced degrees and helping the university expand its own enrollment.
The proposed deal was co-brokered by de la Torre, who knew that SDCCD has something SDSU needs: money.
Last fall, voters approved a $3.5 billion bond measure for SDCCD, which can tap some of that cash to cover most of the cost of building the joint-use academic center. That center will be occupied by both schools, and could help draw tenants to SDSU’s emerging innovation district, where students and faculty will work with industry researchers.
San Diego State University President Adela de la Torre and SD Community College District Chancellor Gregory Smith sign an educational partnership during a press conference in the parking lot of Snapdragon Stadium on Thursday, July 17, 2025 in San Diego, CA. (Meg McLaughlin / The San Diego Union-Tribune)
SDSU also is addressing one of the biggest problems in the CSU — a shortage of student housing.
The system added more than 17,000 beds statewide over the past decade and is in the process of adding roughly 5,600 more, says a recent CSU report. But an additional 12,600 might be needed through 2030 to deal with projected systemwide growth.
SDSU recently began the first phase of Evolve, a student village that will eventually add 5,200 beds, pushing the school’s housing capacity above 13,000. The project could cost as much as $1 billion.
About 30 miles north, CSUSM also is scrambling to add beds. It will house about 2,100 students this fall, a figure that it expects to rise to 3,585 by late 2027 as new dorms open.
The jump involves a close partnership with Sea Breeze Properties, which is developing North City, a residential, educational, entertainment and dining district across the street from the university that aims to emulate Los Angeles’ bustling Westwood area near UCLA.
Sea Breeze has built large dorms in the district for use by CSUSM students. And the relationship is about to deepen, as Sea Breeze breaks ground on an 11-story complex that will house another 930 students.
And close by is the 460-unit apartment building 222 North City — which will be open to everyone but is likely to draw lots of university workers as well as staff who will work at the $1.2 billion medical center that Scripps will build on its own land. The center will provide clinical slots for students in CSUSM’s nursing program, one of the state’s largest.
In July, Cal State San Marcos President Ellen Neufeldt spoke at the ground breaking of a $110 million science and engineering complex that will rise on campus. (Michael Ho / The San Diego Union-Tribune)
Neufeldt wants things to happen faster.
“I’m so proud that people can drive to this campus and have access to education,” she said. “But it is also important that people have a place to put their head at night.”
De la Torre expressed similar sentiments while discussing the new Mission Valley campus, which she sees as a big launch pad for students and science.
Such remarks don’t surprise Adam Day, a San Diego businessman who served 10 years on the CSU Board of Trustees, two as its chair.
“Ellen and Adela have very clear visions and goals, and they stay on track,” Day said. “It’s a common denominator. And they’re hitting things out of the ballpark.”