Image by Jimmy Lai/HIGHLANDER
My alma mater, University of California, Riverside (UCR) emailed me yesterday (cuz’ I’m on their email list) with a request to fill out a survey. Despite my misgivings about the likelihood of anything this old geezer says being thought of as relevant, I decided to go ahead, mainly because I want an answer to one question.
Now I’m proudly class of ’73 (yes that’s 1973) when UCR had 5,000 some students and had an excellent reputation for a focus on undergraduate education. Yes, I skated through some classes to focus on so-called extracurricular activities. (Hello Scots on the Rocks Week!) But I believe I got a first class education. Almost all classes were taught by full, tenured professors whose main interest was teaching back then, and I learned very important lessons in the classes that challenged me. All that is to say that I have very fond memories of UCR, not least of which is meeting my future wife there, in a most peculiar way that you can read about elsewhere in the Sharon category on this here website. Of course I haven’t been back on campus since the early 80’s, so I’m sure things have changed.
Now, as to that one question that I need answered. No, I didn’t forget about that, I just made you wait. 🙂 According to all official accounts, the student enrollment at UCR in 2023-2024 was 26,426 students. It’s not hard to fathom UCR growing from 5,000 students to 26,000 students in 50 years. But…, but…, everything I read now says that UCR has admitted a record 71,069 first-year and transfer students for fall 2025. I’ve seen that in multiple reports and posts, so it is not a typo. But no one even bothers to offer an explanation. How is that even physically possible? 45,000 new students in 2 years on a single campus? Is there some kind of time/space discontinuity on campus that I haven’t read about? Are they cloning professors in the Biology Building?
Journalists who print numbers that don’t make sense have always been a bugaboo of mine, so at the end of the survey, I asked my question. I doubt I’ll get an answer, but I’m a writer, so I reserve the right to someday make something up, and since I write Science Fiction, I’ll probably just let my imagination go wild with that.
Musings of a Restless Mind 