Facing an unprecedented boom in enrollment nearly 60 years ago, the University of California switched its campuses from semesters to faster-paced quarters, aiming to make space for more students by packing the calendar with a greater number of shorter classes.
The move was part of a national trend to join state campuses across the U.S. that were aligning with private universities, including Stanford, that had operated on quarters since World War I to accommodate students in military training programs.
But today, quarters are largely a relic, with roughly 50 campuses nationwide using them — compared to nearly 150 in the mid-1990s — according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
UC, one of the biggest holdouts — with only the Berkeley and Merced campuses on a semester calendar — is considering the switch.
“They’ve tried over and over to do this at different campuses,” said Dan Mitchell, a professor emeritus of the UCLA Anderson School of Management who arrived in Westwood in 1968 and stopped teaching three years ago. “It would be big if they finally did.”
Since last fall, a UC working group has studied the potential switch to semesters as well as hybrid options, calculating the possible effects on student success and financial costs to rearrange registration and class schedules. The group is expected to release its latest report this month and present the findings to the UC systemwide provost, Academic Senate chair and Academic Planning Council in the fall.
“Discussions about ways UC can improve its student experience and support postgraduate outcomes have raised questions about returning to a common calendar — semester or quarter — to facilitate systemwide collaboration and cohesion,” said the most recent report from the Academic Planning Council Workgroup on a Systemwide Academic Calendar.
But change would be complicated. Campuses have different start and end dates, exam periods and breaks. Among the benefits of going all-semester: being able to provide comparable access across the nine undergraduate campuses to courses, summer jobs and internships.
The potential move has been both hailed and critiqued by students and faculty. Having all campuses in sync would make sense for universities that all share a name, some say, adding that transfers would also become more seamless.
Supporters say it’s confusing that some campuses offer joint programs or professorships between departments, colleges and schools, when undergraduates are on quarters and some graduate schools follow semesters. The UCLA and UC Davis law schools, for example, follow semesters while those campuses overall use quarters.
There is also the question of how a calendar change would affect student performance. A 2022 research paper published in the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy that looked at data from hundreds of higher education institutions found that making the switch hurts graduation rates in the short term and, for certain students, can lead to lower grades and a longer period before declaring a major.
One of the biggest downsides is the cost. After factoring in changes or anticipating necessary programming in curriculum, advising, leadership, communication, operations support and information technology, it’s estimated that switching to semesters would cost between $288 million and $371 million systemwide.
A move by California State University to guide its last quarter-based campus, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, to semesters by 2026 is estimated to cost $20 million.
At a time when budgets are being trimmed, some contracts are not getting renewed and a systemwide hiring freeze is in place amid Trump administration cuts, some UC students and faculty say it’s the wrong time to consider a change.
Ryan Manriquez, who until recently was the president of the UC Graduate and Professional Council and served on UC’s calendar working group, said he supported changing calendars in theory — but not any time soon.
“Right now, every single dollar the university has at its disposal should go back to student services and vital functions like research,” said Manriquez, who graduated this year from UC Berkeley with a master’s in public policy.
Tomris Karaismailoglu, who graduated in June from UC San Diego with a degree in interdisciplinary computing and the arts, said they felt the quarter system hurt them during internship and job applications.
“Most students elsewhere graduated when I was still in classes because semester schools end earlier, which meant those students had a head start on being able to start jobs,” Karaismailoglu said. “I felt anxiety around that.”
Yesenia Pérez, who received her undergraduate degree from UC Santa Barbara in June and will be studying at the campus in the fall for a master’s in technology management, said she empathized with both sides.
“In a 10-week quarter, you go through content so quickly,” Pérez said. “It’s a double-edged sword. If you are passionate about the class, you get to learn more in a semester, but if you just want it to be over, then it’s only 10 weeks.”
Many faculty have voiced opposition, citing potential increases in workload, including redoing syllibi.
“The impacts of such a change — logistically, administratively, financially, on student learning outcomes and faculty/staff working conditions — are potentially massive,” the Council of UC Faculty Assns. wrote in a statement to its members this year. The organization called “on all UC faculty to mobilize and demand the right to study, discuss and vote on this initiative.”
But for Qingzu Yin, a professor in the Department of Earth and planetary sciences at UC Davis, the transition is long overdue. Yin said he hoped the initial costs of revamping the calendar would be offset by savings later on, such as having fewer university-wide registration periods. He believed the educational experience would also improve.
“If you open up any textbook in any subject area, there are hardly any books limited to only 10 chapters or less. It is typically 15-20 chapters,” Yin said in an email. “So what instructors can do in a quarter system with the materials … [is] cut the materials” or “combine multiple chapters into one week. So the students will be left with either ‘malnutrition,’ or overdose of information in 10 weeks without much chance to digest fully.”
