Capping a year of joy and anxiety, San Diego State University will award degrees to more than 12,000 students during three days of graduation ceremonies set to begin early Friday at Viejas Arena, just as Cal State San Marcos begins conferring more than 4,000 degrees of its own.
SDSU also will hold a ceremony on May 22 at the Mexicali campus of the Universidad Autónoma de Baja California for the benefit of students whose family can’t cross the border to visit SDSU, the university says.
The school said that a record 12,277 students at its main campus east of downtown San Diego and its small campus in the Imperial Valley had completed their work and submitted their intent to graduate.
The five most popular degree programs during this year’s graduation program are psychology (559 recipients), criminal justice (443), finance (382), general business (367) and computer science (366).
The class of 2025 is among the largest in the 128-year history of SDSU, which enrolled a record 38,396 students last fall at its main campus east of downtown San Diego.
SDSU’s sister campus to the north, California State University San Marcos, will confer a record 4,041 degrees during commencement exercises to be held on campus Friday and Saturday.
San Marcos is only 36 years old. But it already has about 15,400 students and is expecting steady growth.
The graduation ceremonies at SDSU come only a few months after it achieved something it had long sought: being named a Research 1 school by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. That placed the school on a list that already included such research giants as Harvard, MIT and UC San Diego.
SDSU earned an R1 classification because it spends at least $50 million on research and development and it awards at least 70 doctoral research-scholarship degrees.
The university is anticipating further expansion in science and engineering. The California State University Board of Trustees said in February that it intended to drum up the money SDSU needs to build a major new research center. That complex could be up and running in 2027.
Separately, SDSU will also open a new $80 million STEM education center in Brawley in Imperial County this fall. The center is largely meant to train people to work in the emerging lithium extraction and processing industry next to the Salton Sea. Lithium is a key component in the batteries used to power electric vehicles and many devices.
The projects have been overshadowed by cuts that the Trump istration has made in science, technology and engineering at universities throughout the country.
