College is increasingly unaffordable in California. Tuition isn’t the main problem

Autumn brings the return of students to campus — and, with them, inevitable chatter about rising education costs.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.