Nearly five months after announcing that it would cut five of its 29 sports as a cost-saving measure, the University of California at Berkeley now says it has raised enough money to preserve three.

Cal officials said Friday that they had received pledges of $12-million to $13-million from donors, enough to keep alive the women’s gymnastics, women’s lacrosse, and rugby programs. Baseball and men’s gymnastics, whose pledges fell far short of what was required, will be eliminated at the end of this academic year, officials said.

“Although the amount of money raised for these two programs is meaningful”—baseball, for instance, raised between $1.5-million and $2-million—”the teams’ costs are also significant,” the university’s vice chancellor, Frank Yeary, said in a statement. “Both programs would have needed to raise multiples of what they actually did raise to meet our criteria. In the context of both current and forecasted economic and financial conditions, we simply could not agree to short-term, stopgap measures.”

Cal’s athletic director, Sandy Barbour, stressed Friday that the cutbacks would not threaten the university’s compliance with Title IX, the federal gender-equity law, as some observers had suggested the earlier round of cuts might have done.

“We are certainly providing a large number of opportunities for our women on our campus to compete, and we continue to monitor … the various opportunities in sport across the board to make sure they continue to accommodate their interests and abilities,” she said during a conference call with reporters.

Of the total pledges raised since September, when the university first announced its intention to cut four teams and demote rugby to “varsity club” status, university officials said they were confident that at least $8-million would materialize to fully support each of the reinstated sports for the next seven to 10 years.

Friday’s news is the latest twist in Cal’s budgetary roller coaster as the athletic department attempts to pare back its expenses and reduce its annual institutional subsidy from $13-million to $5-million by 2014.

Cal’s challenges—which have played out on a national stage as the state of California struggles through a crippling economic downturn—are nonetheless familiar to other athletic programs with similar fiscal concerns, Barbour said. “Our financial difficulties are not unique,” she said. And neither is the solution, she added: If broad-based athletic programs want to stay afloat, she said, they will need to step up their outreach, as Cal has done.

“We’re going to have to work very hard with our communities to make sure we have the funding … to be able to have these programs,” she said. “It’s not going to be rested on the back of the campus.”