Autumn brings the return of students to campus — and, with them, inevitable chatter about rising education costs.
California
College is increasingly unaffordable in California. Tuition isn’t the main problem
Students and families gather outside UC Berkeley’s Anchor House on Aug. 21, 2024 in Berkeley. Student housing is now the biggest line item for many attending the university.
Earlier this month, the Trump Administration added to this chatter by proposing a “compact” that would require universities to freeze tuition for five years. This discourse, however, tends to overlook a crucial wrinkle: college is expensive, but at many universities, the main culprit isn’t tuition, it’s housing.
At UC Berkeley, tuition is under $18,000 per year — far less than many private high schools in the Bay Area. Tuition for a high schooler at San Francisco’s Lick Wilmerding will set a family back more than $60,000 per year.
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Housing is where the cost of college really racks up.
For 2025-2026, UC Berkeley estimates its own annual room and board price at $22,000 — 20% more than the cost of taking a full course load. Students who want to live on campus thus face a total sticker price of about $40,000.
What families need to understand as they consider the college is that the so-called “cost of attendance,” which bundles tuition with room and board, is the price of proximity to campus culture.
Lest we scoff at spending more than $80,000 over four years on room and board just to get “the college experience,” we should recall that campus culture is more than parties and football games. Being close to faculty and other students is often the catalyst for informal learning and relationship formation that smooth the path to employment, generate research ideas and build companies.
Living on or near campus is not just fun, it’s often foundational.
In 2009, for example, two Berkeley students started Alphabet Energy, which would go on to patent important thermoelectric technology. In 2017, two others founded Kiwi Campus, a delivery robot company. Covariant, a leading AI and robotics company, was founded by Berkeley professor Pieter Abbeel and his former students Peter Chen, Rocky Duan and Tianhau Zhang in 2017 as well.
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Stories like these are why Pitchbook ranks Berkeley number one in the world at spawning startups. (Sorry, Stanford.)
Unfortunately, California’s traditional deference to local politics has made housing both on campus and near campus painfully scarce.
The $22,000 annual room and board bill keeps students out of campus housing, pushes up prices off campus, and prevents connections that could have otherwise sparked innovation. Across the UC system, opposition to new on-campus and off-campus housing has blocked enrollment expansion.
The most well-known example is the controversy over Berkeley’s People’s Park. Thanks to the obstructionist tools provided by the California Environmental Quality Act, local activists were able to stall UC’s plan for another 1,000 campus housing slots for years before the state Supreme Court finally cleared the way for construction in 2024. Meanwhile, nearby residents sued UCLA in 2018 to stop the construction of a tall housing complex near campus. While that building ultimately went up, it has fewer units than originally planned. And to this day, activists at UC Santa Cruz have stymied the building of what the school calls the Student Housing West project.
Using procedural veto points, often on dishonest environmental grounds, California activists have enacted a college housing blockade. The result is that our schools are smaller and more expensive, our students are more scattered and our scientific and technological progress is delayed.
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There is good news to report, though. A couple of years ago, the state legislature exempted campus housing projects paying union-negotiated wages and receiving a special environmental certification from CEQA. Amendments last year lowered barriers further. This year, the legislature cleared away the CEQA barriers to essentially all housing in existing urban areas, not just narrow categories like “student dorms on university-owned property built with union labor and certified as ‘super-green.’”
But clearing away procedural obstacles is only half the battle.
California also needs to ensure that local governments zone land for dense housing near universities. Again, progress is at hand. Last Friday, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law Senate Bill 79, a controversial measure that allows 4-8 story apartment buildings within a half mile of fixed transit stops, and Assembly Bill 893, which allows 4-6 story apartment buildings and student dorms within a half mile of UC, CSU and community college campuses.
Unfortunately, AB893 does not apply to parcels that cities have zoned for low-density residential housing. It also requires developers to pay union-negotiated “prevailing wages,” which are prohibitively costly in most markets. SB79 strikes a better balance. It establishes union-labor standards only for expensive high-rise projects. And it applies to all land in the target geographies (½ mile of transit), while giving cities flexibility to “reallocate the density” among the affected parcels. Local governments will be able to limit incursions on the status quo in neighborhoods where preservationist sentiment runs strongest, so long as the city allows commensurately greater density in other areas near transit.
Guest opinions in Open Forum and Insight are produced by writers with expertise, personal experience or original insights on a subject of interest to our readers. Their views do not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Chronicle editorial board, which is committed to providing a diversity of ideas to our readership.
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To supercharge college housing and enhance the agglomeration effects UC is so famous for, the state should treat student housing like the critical infrastructure that it is. Future legislatures should extend SB79 so that it covers a ring around every university. If it does so, California will make college more accessible and add to the creative ferment it facilitates.
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This is the true college experience — and its payoffs redound far beyond the campus.
Jordan McGillis (@jordanmcgillis) is a Novak Journalism Fellow. Christopher Elmendorf (@CSElmendorf) is a law professor at UC Davis.
California
California’s race for governor and other key primaries remain unsettled as vote count continues
California’s crowded, protracted gubernatorial primary is going to take a little more time to settle.
The race remained too early to call Wednesday morning with 50% of the expected vote counted, according to NBC News’ Decision Desk. Three main candidates — former Fox News host Steve Hilton, a Republican, and two Democrats, former Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra and billionaire activist Tom Steyer — are competing for two spots in the general election, with the candidate in fourth place, Republican Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, running well behind.
Hilton had 27% support in the all-party primary with about half of votes still left to count, while Becerra had 26% and Steyer had 20%. Bianco was the only other candidate in double digits, at 11%.
In California, all candidates run on the same primary ballot in the primary and the top two vote-getters, regardless of party, move on to the general election.
It’s difficult to say when it will be clear which two candidates advance to the November general election, however, due to the state’s protracted vote counting.
And with millions of ballots left to count, other key races in California remain uncalled as well, including the second runoff spot to face Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass one on one in November, several House races that could help determine the majority next year, and more.
In the governor’s race, all three candidates rallied supporters around the state as the evening drew on.
“We’re not there yet, but it’s looking good,” Hilton told allies. “It looks very much as if Californians really will have the chance to vote for change in November and take our state in a new direction, a fresh start for our state, which is long overdue.”
But while Hilton was narrowly in first place when he spoke, Democratic candidates were capturing the majority of the votes.
Becerra looked back at his own “underdog story,” from his immigrant relatives to his bid for governor, which took some time to catch fire.
“Almost immediately, he’s counted out, an afterthought, overlooked by many, outspent by a ton, even called along the way to drop out and save us the trouble,” Becerra recounted to his supporters. “Well, guess what? The underdog stayed in the fight. Like my parents, I never gave up.”
Steyer struck a hopeful note in his election night speech despite a deficit in the vote count.
“It might take some time to figure out where this is going, we’re going to wait till every ballot is counted, we’re going to give democracy a time to work, and we know we finished really strong,” Steyer said.
Major battleground districts
GOP Rep. David Valadao’s district has been one of Democrats’ top targets for years, but two Democrats are locked in a close race for the second spot in the November general election against the incumbent.
School board member Randy Villegas, who won support from national progressives, has a slight lead over state legislator Jasmeet Bains, 30% to 26%, with less than half of the expected vote tallied in the 22nd District. Valadao is comfortably in first place.
And in Northern California’s 6th District, Rep. Kevin Kiley — who was elected as a Republican and switched to become an independent this election cycle, as he runs in another newly redrawn district — is bunched up in a tight race that includes Democrat Richard Pan, a former state legislator, and Republican Michael Stansfield. Currently, Stansfield is running ahead of Pan; they spent much of Tuesday night and Wednesday morning trading the lead, which could have significant general election implications.
Meanwhile, outside California, Democrats think they might be able to challenge for one of Montana’s red-tinted congressional districts this fall, after Rep. Ryan Zinke decided to retire. But less than 2 percentage points separate Democrats Sam Forstag and Ryan Busse with more than 85% of the expected vote tallied in their primary in Montana’s 1st District.
Read more about Tuesday’s House primaries here.
A safe seat battle to watch
Plenty of other House districts in California — and a few elsewhere — still have unsettled primaries, but one attracted particular attention due to how nasty the campaign got.
In Southern California, where two Republican incumbents are facing off in one district due to redistricting, Rep. Ken Calvert has advanced to the general election, but Rep. Young Kim is still battling for the second spot. She leads Democrat Esther Kim-Varet in the race for second, 22% to 16%, with about half of the vote in.
Who will face Bass in Los Angeles?
While Bass is projected to advance to a November runoff in Los Angeles, it’s not yet clear whether she’ll face Republican Spencer Pratt or Democrat Nithya Raman.
Bass has about 37% of the vote to 29% for Pratt and 21% for Raman so far, with approximately half of the expected vote tallied.
Speaking to supporters on election night, Raman, a member of the Los Angeles City Council, said that “tonight may not give us a final answer on this race.”
“Many thousands of votes will be counted in the days ahead, and we may not get an answer we like, but regardless of what happens next, nobody, nobody can take away what all of us have built together,” she continued.
Pratt, meanwhile, was looking ahead to a potential matchup with Bass when he spoke to reporters.
“Now I have five months to get deep into every community that hasn’t heard my message to make them safe,” said Pratt, a former reality TV star. “So I’m actually very excited, because I felt very rushed. It’s a big city, and I was not able to talk to as many people as I look forward to talking to.”
Bass also projected optimism, telling her backers, “We got a lot more to go, but so far it’s looking good.”
California
Midterm primaries 2026 live: results and reaction after six states including California and Iowa cast ballots
Lucy Campbell
Millions of voters across the country are heading to the polls today in crucial primaries in a slew of key gubernatorial, Senate and House races.
Here’s a quick rundown of what we’re watching:
California
Voters are casting ballots on who should lead the nation’s most populous state (and the world’s fourth largest economy), where there is no clear leader among candidates vying to advance in the race to succeed term-limited Democratic governor Gavin Newsom. The race for Los Angeles mayor is also on the ballot, along with a series of high-stakes US House contests in the state’s newly redrawn congressional districts – which are set to play an outsized and potentially decisive role in the battle for power in Washington in November’s midterm elections. My colleague Lauren Gambino has more:
Iowa
Per my colleague Chris Stein, with Trump’s approval ratings deep underwater, gas prices high and historical political trends favoring the party out of power, Democrats this year are considering a comeback in Iowa, putting the state at the center of their campaigns to win back control of both the US House and the Senate. That effort for a “once-in-a-generation” breakthrough in the GOP-dominated state is being led by pro-hunting Democrat Rob Sand, who is running for governor. Chris wrote about him below. Democrats also believe they have a shot at winning three of the state’s US House seats and a competitive chance at securing a US Senate seat, where the GOP frontrunner recently called Trump’s war on Iran a “political liability”.
New Jersey
One of this year’s most closely watched House midterms will take place in the battleground district currently represented by now-infamous Republican Tom Kean Jr, who has drawn public scrutiny and concern after missing more than 100 House votes due to an undisclosed illness. Voters are deciding which Democrat will run against him in November – and the seat is a must-win for the party. The frontrunner, veteran army trauma surgeon and political newcomer Adam Hamawy, has secured endorsements from the likes of Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar. My colleague Joseph Gedeon has more:
New Mexico
Contests in the state include primaries for congressional seats, a US Senate seat and a long list of statewide offices, but the governor’s race is the main event. Deb Haaland, who was Joe Biden’s interior secretary, is running for the Democratic nomination, which could put her on a historic path for Native American leaders.
Montana
In Montana, a five-way Democratic fight is under way for the retiring Republican senator’s seat. Independent Seth Bodnar, former president of the University of Montana, is outraising them all at the moment but they’re refusing to step aside, Politico reports this morning.
South Dakota
The race is on for state governor, Sioux Falls mayor, a US Senate and House seat, a Republican primary for local lawmakers. The incumbent GOP governor Larry Rhoden faces three primary challengers in his first run for a full term. He stepped up into the role from the lieutenant governorship when the former governor, the since-ousted Kristi Noem, left to lead the Department of Homeland Security.
The Associated Press contributed reporting
Key events Joseph Gedeon
On the day Donald Trump endorsed him as a tireless advocate for New Jersey’s seventh district, the representative Tom Kean Jr was, as he has been since early March, nowhere to be found.
Kean, a New Jersey Republican, was last seen when he cast a House floor vote on 5 March, and he is running unopposed in Tuesday’s Republican primary. The Democratic race in his district, meanwhile, has attracted multiple candidates and ample fundraising.
In late April, his office said he was dealing with a “personal medical issue” and would be back “very soon”. He told the New Jersey Globe last month he expected to return within “the next couple of weeks”. In the meantime, Kean’s social media accounts have continued posting regularly, with staff attending ribbon-cuttings and graduation ceremonies on his behalf. In my home state of New Mexico, voters from both parties will nominate candidates to become the next governor, as Michelle Lujan Grisham is set to step down from the seat she’s filled since 2019. Increasingly recognized as a solidly blue state, the Democratic nominee is likely to win the general election.
Democratic voters will choose to nominate either Deb Haaland, who served as Joe Biden’s interior secretary, or Sam Bregman, the Bernalillo County district attorney. Haaland has polled safely in the lead in the run-up to the election. Her win would be a victory for Native American advocates across the country and a rebuke of the Trump administration.
A single, working mother, Haaland came on the national scene in 2018 when she was elected to Congress alongside a wave of freshman, female lawmakers known as “The Squad” who’d run in reaction to Donald Trump’s election in 2016. Haaland resigned from the House of Representatives in 2021 when Joe Biden chose her to lead his interior department, making her the first Native American to serve in the roll, which includes overseeing much of the nation’s public lands and the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
During her time in congress, Haaland – who is from Laguna Pueblo – introduced legislation to stem the crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous People, and as interior secretary she oversaw the formation of a new Missing & Murdered Unit (MMU) within the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Last year, New Mexico became the fourth state in the country to create its own law enforcement alert system for missing Indigenous people. Haaland also launched a historic effort to investigate the legacy of Native American boarding schools.
If elected in the November general election, Haaland would become the first Native American woman governor elected in the country. Haaland has campaigned as a fierce critic of Donald Trump, saying in campaign ads that, “Governors are the first line of defense against the horrific policies of the Trump administration.” Since Trump returned to office, New Mexico has been one of few Democratic strongholds in the south-west – with the state working to shore up protections for abortion patients, transgender people and SNAP and Medicaid recipients.
California’s primary elections, including its fiercely fought gubernatorial contest, will be at the mercy of a notoriously slow vote-counting system after the polls close on Tuesday, and it could be days or even weeks before the outcomes of the tightest races become clear.
Voting experts expect the state’s 58 county elections offices to be deluged with last-minute absentee ballots, as they have been in the last few election cycles, and spend weeks undertaking a painstaking ballot-by-ballot verification process. That presents a procedural problem whenever races are close, as they tend to be in the state’s most competitive congressional districts, and the whole country is left waiting – as it was in 2020, 2022 and 2024 – to find out which party controls the House of Representatives.
Knocking on strangers’ doors on a warm May afternoon in Trenton, New Jersey, Adam Hamawy did not seem fazed when more than a few went unanswered.
It’s his first time running for office, but this is an area where he has experience. After returning from a medical mission in Gaza in 2024, Hamawy went to Washington to describe the crisis – which he viewed as a US-funded genocide – to lawmakers, only to encounter “too many doors that were closed, that didn’t even want to listen”.
“I could only define it as a genocide, because I saw the bodies of the people that came in,” the veteran army trauma surgeon and political newcomer reflected, while walking between houses. “And it wasn’t an accident. You can’t have an accident, every single day for three years.
Rob Sand, the best known Democrat in Iowa, is running to lead a state that Republicans have come to dominate under Donald Trump, and Democrats believe his candidacy for governor could be the breakthrough needed to win key Iowa offices in the November midterm elections. With Trump’s approval ratings deep underwater, gas prices high and historical political trends favoring the party out of power, Democrats this year are considering a comeback in Iowa, putting the state at the center of their campaigns to win back control of both the US House of Representatives and the Senate. On Tuesday, voters will cast ballots in primary elections that set the stage for months of what is likely to be fevered campaigning by candidates of both parties.
“I think this is a once-in-a-generation opportunity for us to be able to win here in Iowa. I mean, this is a state that has completely hit the bottom,” said Josh Turek, a state representative who is one of two Democrats vying to represent Iowa in the US Senate.
Voters in six states have been casting their ballots in the US midterm election primaries. Here are some of the images from polling stations that have dropped on the news wires today:
Fabiola Cineas
A wave of Democratic doctors, scientists and public health professionals across the country are seeking office in the midterm elections in a rebuke to Donald Trump and Robert F Kennedy Jr’s health policies. They share a diagnosis of what ails American governance – disinformation, funding cuts and the rollback of research, among other things – and the belief that their clinical and scientific training equips them to treat it.
They have watched the Trump administration’s health policies play out in their exam rooms, their labs and the communities they serve, and they want to stop the bleeding.
Uwa Ede-Osifo
In California, voters can select any candidate among the long list of gubernatorial hopefuls, regardless of which party they have registered with.
The system was put in place under former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who supported the open primary, or “jungle primary”, as a way to create more competition in races that Democrats won year after year. Schwarzenegger, who left office in 2011, was the last Republican elected to statewide office in California. In a crowded race like this year’s gubernatorial primary, the system could cause some unexpected results – such as the possibility that emerged earlier this year of two Republicans advancing to the general election in deep blue California.
That situation now appears unlikely, but the possibility has prompted some Democrats to push to overhaul the way the state votes.
Lucy Campbell
Millions of voters across the country are heading to the polls today in crucial primaries in a slew of key gubernatorial, Senate and House races.
Here’s a quick rundown of what we’re watching: California Iowa New Jersey New Mexico Montana South Dakota The Associated Press contributed reporting
Explained: what is California’s ‘jungle primary’?
Voters are casting ballots on who should lead the nation’s most populous state (and the world’s fourth largest economy), where there is no clear leader among candidates vying to advance in the race to succeed term-limited Democratic governor Gavin Newsom. The race for Los Angeles mayor is also on the ballot, along with a series of high-stakes US House contests in the state’s newly redrawn congressional districts – which are set to play an outsized and potentially decisive role in the battle for power in Washington in November’s midterm elections. My colleague Lauren Gambino has more:
Per my colleague Chris Stein, with Trump’s approval ratings deep underwater, gas prices high and historical political trends favoring the party out of power, Democrats this year are considering a comeback in Iowa, putting the state at the center of their campaigns to win back control of both the US House and the Senate. That effort for a “once-in-a-generation” breakthrough in the GOP-dominated state is being led by pro-hunting Democrat Rob Sand, who is running for governor. Chris wrote about him below. Democrats also believe they have a shot at winning three of the state’s US House seats and a competitive chance at securing a US Senate seat, where the GOP frontrunner recently called Trump’s war on Iran a “political liability”.
One of this year’s most closely watched House midterms will take place in the battleground district currently represented by now-infamous Republican Tom Kean Jr, who has drawn public scrutiny and concern after missing more than 100 House votes due to an undisclosed illness. Voters are deciding which Democrat will run against him in November – and the seat is a must-win for the party. The frontrunner, veteran army trauma surgeon and political newcomer Adam Hamawy, has secured endorsements from the likes of Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar. My colleague Joseph Gedeon has more:
Contests in the state include primaries for congressional seats, a US Senate seat and a long list of statewide offices, but the governor’s race is the main event. Deb Haaland, who was Joe Biden’s interior secretary, is running for the Democratic nomination, which could put her on a historic path for Native American leaders.
In Montana, a five-way Democratic fight is under way for the retiring Republican senator’s seat. Independent Seth Bodnar, former president of the University of Montana, is outraising them all at the moment but they’re refusing to step aside, Politico reports this morning.
The race is on for state governor, Sioux Falls mayor, a US Senate and House seat, a Republican primary for local lawmakers. The incumbent GOP governor Larry Rhoden faces three primary challengers in his first run for a full term. He stepped up into the role from the lieutenant governorship when the former governor, the since-ousted Kristi Noem, left to lead the Department of Homeland Security.
California
California Democratic gubernatorial candidate criticized over meeting with trans athlete | Fox News Video
‘Fox News @ Night’ panelists Roxanne Hoge and Stella Escobedo discuss the debate over transgender athletes in California and the state’s closely watched mayoral and gubernatorial races.
Roxanne Hoge and Stella Escobedo delve into the latest Berkeley IGS poll, revealing the frontrunners in California’s heated gubernatorial race. The discussion extends to the Los Angeles mayoral race, where candidates Karen Bass and Spencer Pratt are locked in a tight contest. Panelists weigh in on candidate endorsements and the broader political landscape ahead of the upcoming elections.
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