About 54 percent of students in the University of California system — and about 63 percent of those at its prestigious Berkeley campus — have at least one parent who is an immigrant, according to a report released this month.

The report, by researchers at the Berkeley campus’s Center for Studies in Higher Education, is based on a 2006 survey of the University of California system’s undergraduates. Because only 38 percent of students responded, its numbers are not exact, even though the researchers involved regard them as close.

The report says “the startling number and range” of student backgrounds revealed through its survey “points to the need for an expanded notion of diversity beyond older racial and ethnic paradigms.”

Among its key findings, the report says that just 54 percent of undergraduates in the university system said that English was their sole first language.

At the Berkeley campus, 28 percent of undergraduates immigrated to the United States, and 72 percent of undergraduates have at least one immigrant grandparent. Throughout the university system, 95 percent of Asian-American students, 88 percent of Hispanic students, and 40 percent of white students reported that they or at least one parent or grandparent came from outside the United States.

The report says that first- or second-generation immigrant students tend to gravitate toward fields such as engineering and the sciences, and to be focused heavily on careers and professional prestige. Although some come from low-income backgrounds, most are more likely than other immigrants to come from families that are well educated. —Peter Schmidt