Rajesh Gupta tapped a spreadsheet and said, “If we don’t drive these numbers down, the faculty will revolt!”

He was referring to soaring enrollment for UC San Diego’s computer science program. The student-faculty ratio has hit 44-to-1, twice as high as it should be.

“Faculty want to accommodate as many students as possible, but they don’t want to lower the quality of classes,” said Gupta, chair of the computer science and engineering department.

The dilemma symbolizes the sharp growing pains being felt at UC San Diego, especially in the Jacobs School of Engineering, home to one-quarter of the university’s nearly 34,000 students.


The engineering school is so crowded that one faculty member asked in an email, “What does a UCSD (computer science) degree mean if more than 50 percent of the classes were taught by temporary instructors?”

The university’s overall enrollment rose by nearly 8,000 in the past decade, a boom fueled by general population growth and UC San Diego’s increased appeal.

In addition, the private sector has been pushing the region’s premier public university to train ever greater numbers of students to do everything from designing drones, to testing pharmaceutical drugs, to making sense of genomes.

UC San Diego could have tapped the brakes on enrollment growth, particularly for the computer engineering department, which is using 500 tutors to help handle the crush of students. But there’s a go-go culture on campus, even though the university doesn’t have most of the money it needs to handle the expansion.


“If I’d had the resources, I would have grown even faster,” said Albert Pisano, dean of the Jacobs School of Engineering. “I’m trying to meet the demands of students, faculty and industry.”

Computer science students at the EnVision Maker Studio learn how to make, program and build a working drone using their own circuit boards. / photo by Nelvin C. Cepeda * U-T

More students are on the way.

UC San Diego intends to increase enrollment by 6,000 students during the next five years, pushing the total to 40,000. That would make the campus bigger than UC Berkeley is today.


Plans also call for at least seven new buildings that would collectively cost more than $400 million, a strategy that’s largely unfunded at this point.

Even if the campus stopped expanding right now, UC San Diego would still face serious problems.

Campus leaders said they need $300 million for new classrooms and laboratories. There’s also a bad shortage of on-campus housing; the waiting list for such accommodations is 3,000 names long. Such a backlog could prevent UC San Diego from recruiting some of the elite graduate students needed to help run research projects.

The rollicking pace of change is stirring concern among the faculty.


“We have to make sure we don’t become a big factory that just turns out a lot of graduates,” said Todd Coleman, a bioengineering professor. “We need to be cultivating leaders who become vice presidents and presidents of companies, entrepreneurs and innovators like Mark Zuckerberg (of Facebook) and Elon Musk (of SpaceX).”

UC San Diego is one of the nation’s 10 biggest research schools, raising about $1 billion a year for research.

Engineering is an important contributor of money and prestige. U.S. News and World Report recently said the university has the country’s 17th best graduate-level engineering school.

The rankings show that UC San Diego is great in some areas, notably bioengineering, but that it isn’t excellent across the board.


Pisano is trying to fix the disparity, hoping to push UC San Diego into the top 10 list, which is dominated by schools such as Stanford University and Caltech. His strategy partly involves adding small institutes that focus on hot fields such as robotics and wearable sensors.

The dean also is adding faculty and trying to raise donations from industry and alumni.

The money part could be a hard sell. This month, UC San Diego acknowledged that it largely ignored its alumni for decades, figuring that it would always get the money it needed from the state. Then public funding plummeted in the past decade, and UC San Diego now finds itself asking for money from alumni who are largely disconnected from their alma mater.

Engineering has accounted for more than half of the university’s growth during the past decade, adding about 4,000 students. Total enrollment for the engineering school stands at 8,900.


Much of the expansion has involved computer science, which has 2,279 undergraduates. The campus has boasted that the figure is the highest in the UC system. But faculty are fuming about crowding and workloads. There’s also concern that “compsci” will shift its focus from research to teaching.

Gupta said compsci enrollment might need to drop by 800 to 900 students. Pisano said the figure will probably remain mostly unchanged, but that there would be a higher percentage of master’s students.

“Industry is saying, ‘Where is your data science program?’” Pisano said. “We need more people with master’s degrees in data science.”

Data science is one of the hottest fields in the country. By combining statistics and computer science, researchers are able to analyze extraordinary amounts of data. They’re looking for “actionable” information in areas such as drug development, stock-market fraud and weather forecasting.


Data scientists also have been sifting through online posts in recent days to see if they can find a link to terrorism in Thursday’s loss of EgyptAir Flight 804 about 180 miles north of Egypt.

Gupta estimates it could cost $100 million to start a top-flight data science program. At the moment, they don’t have that money.

What they have is demand for their students. It comes from people like Nik Devereaux, director of software engineering at ViaSat, a Carlsbad-based company that creates and sells digital satellite telecommunications.

“We get the majority of our interns and new hires from UCSD,” said Devereaux, an alumnus. “They have the technical skills we want, and we find that they fit our corporate culture. We want more of them.”