Walters: UC Merced turns 20, but remains California’s awkward stepchild

The Legislature’s budget analyst, Gabe Petek, is marking the 20th anniversary of University of California’s Merced campus with an overview of how it has fared.

In polite language, Petek fundamentally says the campus has fallen well short of its enrollment targets, requires much more state aid than other UC branches to operate, has not had the big economic impact that its advocates promised, and really wasn’t needed to relieve student applications.

“Since 2005, the UC system has added approximately 44,000 resident undergraduate slots,” Petek writes. “The 7,500 undergraduate slots created at UC Merced accounts for 17% of that growth. While contributing to the increase in UC enrollment capacity, UC Merced has repeatedly failed to meet its campus enrollment targets.

“Moreover, enrolling additional students at UC Merced comes with a higher state cost than enrolling additional students at the more established UC campuses. The $85 million in UC Merced funding above the rebenching formula equates to roughly an additional 10,000 students that could have been supported at the other UC general campuses, many of which had available capacity.”

The rebenching formula is how the UC system equalizes funding across its campuses.

Reading Petek’s report was, to quote the inimitable Yogi Berra, “déjà vu all over again,” because I had written a number of skeptical columns about the UC Merced project that then-Gov. Gray Davis and other advocates were touting in the early 2000s.

“Merced was chosen for the campus primarily because of the offer of free land, because of pressure from politicians who wanted to position themselves as saviors of the valley, a politically important region, and because developers wanted to make a killing on adjacent land — not as a result of any rational needs or efficiency studies,” I wrote in one column for the Sacramento Bee.

“If a UC campus is to be built in the San Joaquin Valley, locating it in or near a major population center — moribund downtown Fresno, with dozens of potentially usable buildings would be perfect — would make access much easier,” I wrote in another.

“More students could live at home, thereby reducing their living expenses, and that would make attendance more practical. But that simple, if vital, cost-of-living factor is being ignored by UC administrators, UC’s somewhat elitist Board of Regents and politicians in their relentless drive to create a new campus out in the middle of nowhere.”

At the time, UC system executives were almost universally opposed to placing a new campus in Merced because it would siphon away construction and operational funds that, they thought, would be better spent elsewhere. However, they never voiced that opposition publicly because the Board of Regents, composed of governors’ appointees, and Davis were insisting that it be done.

Much of the political pressure was coming from those who owned land around the proposed campus and were hoping to make a financial killing. They included the head of a major state agency and a UC regent.

A charitable land trust donated the proposed campus site, but it ran afoul of federal environmental officials because it contained numerous vernal pools that sustained fairy shrimp, an endangered species found only in the San Joaquin Valley.

When it became evident that the original campus site was a non-starter, it was shifted to a nearby golf course, also owned by the land trust and purchased with a foundation grant. The golf course was a failing business so it was a double win for the trust, which intended to develop housing and other student services.

In short, the motives of Merced campus advocates, both public and private, had only tangential connections to educational needs, and two decades later that’s still true. UC Merced is the system’s poor stepchild.

Dan Walters is a CalMatters columnist.