BERKELEY >> Every morning, they wake up to catch the AC Transit bus to San Francisco, then return home well into the evening, after a 90-minute, rush-hour commute that can be standing-room-only.

But these aren’t your typical commuters battling urban gridlock. They are first-semester freshmen at UC Berkeley, 18- and 19-year-olds who — instead of stumbling a few steps from their dorms to class — are commuting sometimes 2½ hours daily to and from class in an office building in San Francisco.

“It’s not that bad,” said Faizan Samad, 18, a physics major from Seattle. “You’ve just got to tough it out.”

To meet soaring demand with limited space, UC Berkeley has pushed hundreds of students off campus, with freshmen studying in San Francisco — and even London — and other students living in dorms at neighboring universities.

A record 101,650 students vied for a spot this fall at Berkeley, more than applied to Harvard and Stanford combined. Under political pressure to admit more Californians, the University of California last year agreed that its campuses would find a way to educate more undergraduates, and fast — 10,000 more by the fall of 2018.

For thousands of students, the benefit was instant: The odds of admission rose at every UC campus. At ultracompetitive Cal, the admission rate for in-state freshmen topped 20 percent for the first time since 2009.

After opening its doors wider, UC Berkeley has 1,122 more freshmen and transfer students this fall — a 4 percent increase — and nearly 400 more students than it planned for, as more accepted admission offers than expected, according to official enrollment figures released late last month by the campus.

The impact has been instant: The influx of students coincides with the temporary closure of one of the largest buildings on campus, Wheeler Hall, where 29 classrooms and an auditorium are out of commission for renovations.

With classroom space at a premium, UC Berkeley is holding large lectures in performance halls and event spaces. For the first two weeks of the semester, before some students dropped the class, about 2,000 computer science students learned programming from the seats of Zellerbach Hall, where the Philharmonia Orchestra of London and Sweden’s Cullberg Ballet performed just weeks later.

Adding more freshmen and transfer students is important, said student body president Will Morrow. But the rapid enrollment increases, which left little time to build needed classrooms or dorms, he said, “are really pushing the university to its limits.”

The surge of undergraduates has created a more pressing concern: a scarcity of affordable apartments — or room for returning students hoping to live on campus. UC Berkeley is building more housing; in the meantime, the campus was able to place about 330 students in newly leased apartment buildings nearby.

But the school also is testing out less conventional ideas. This summer, it offered 100 students spots in other colleges’ dorms — at Mills College and Holy Names University, small liberal arts schools in East Oakland that have the extra space.

Some freshmen are studying in London, a year or two before they would typically go abroad.

And while Cal has long held courses for some first-semester freshmen a few blocks from campus, this year it expanded its Fall Program for Freshmen all the way to San Francisco. About 300 new students take class and study on three floors of a modern high-rise in the financial district — a space owned by UC Berkeley Extension.

The university promotes the program on a website that boasts “The city is your classroom” superimposed over a postcard view of the San Francisco skyline, complete with the iconic Golden Gate Bridge.

“You got into Berkeley — congrats!” the plug continues. “But why stop there when you can add a semester in San Francisco to your college experience?”

In reality, many of the students say, it has mostly added a hellish commute.

None of the students interviewed said studying in San Francisco was their first choice. But many had been wait-listed, they said, and were so relieved to get accepted that they decided to make the most of the small classes and individual attention.

“It’s more like high school versus going to a school with 40,000 people,” said Alexia Bass, a 19-year-old from Southern California.

It wasn’t until October 2015 that Cal decided it would educate hundreds of new students across the Bay Bridge.

“Basically, in less than a year we pulled together a mini college in San Francisco,” said Ramu Nagappan, who directs UC Berkeley Extension’s department of humanities and education.

The San Francisco program will continue next fall, he said, with some practical changes to ease the burly commute, which he acknowledged is “definitely a pain point.”

Expanding UC Berkeley and other state universities might not be easy, but it is crucial for the state, argues UC Berkeley’s interim provost, Carol Christ. California relies so heavily on its community colleges, she said, that just 26 percent of its college students attend four-year schools — the lowest proportion in the nation, according to a 2013 study published in the California Journal of Politics and Policy.

“We’re a public institution,” Christ said. “We serve the public. Part of that is enabling as many students as we can reasonably accommodate to earn a Berkeley degree, and that’s going to require some imagination.”

UC Berkeley’s creative housing solution blindsided Astra Anggada. The junior transfer student didn’t realize until three days before the semester started that the “Holy Names” on the housing offer was not the name of a Berkeley dorm but a small, Catholic university in Oakland, about 30 minutes away from campus.

Anggada worried that living so far away would make it harder to make friends, but found that the roughly 15 Cal students who share a hallway — decorated with both Cal and Holy Names colors — have grown close.

“I personally kind of feel isolated, but because of that isolation I’ve become closer with the other Cal students,” Anggada said. “That’s one of the pros — making a more solid community because we’re in this isolation together.”

Because of UC Santa Cruz’s campus and community constraints, only 300 additional students have been assigned to Santa Cruz in 2016-17 — the fewest of the nine undergraduate institutions in the UC system.

UCSC has accommodated these new students largely by converting double rooms to triples and lounges to quads, according to director of News and Media Relations Scott Hernandez-Jason.

Santa Cruz Sentinel reporter Ryan Masters contributed to this report.