MERCED, Calif. — Sean Malloy was in the middle of a job interview in 2005 when he saw what he described as a “brown wasteland of construction equipment.”
It was the future site of the University of California, Merced campus.
College officials drove him out to see the university on a scorching summer day.
“All we could see through this chain link fence was just heat rising off the ground and a bunch of construction equipment,” Malloy, 53, said. “And of course I'm on a job interview like, ‘Oh this looks beautiful… I can't wait to teach here!’”
After being hired as a history professor, Malloy said he taught classes in the library as students traveled “to and fro” for the first semester because offices and classrooms weren’t built yet. But, somehow, it worked, he said, because of the eagerness everyone felt being part of something new.
“I think everybody was just excited to make it work, and that included the students, included everybody,” he said. “We had all sorts of challenges, all sorts of difficulties, but there is something about that ‘Hey kids, let's put on a show’ energy.”
Malloy still teaches at the university 20 years later, and the campus is much bigger now. The first class welcomed just under 900 students. Now, there’s just under 9,000.
California officials opened the university with a vision to improve local educational attainment and economic prosperity in the San Joaquin Valley – a region home to high poverty rates and low academic achievement.
Since then, UC Merced has established itself as a research powerhouse and has climbed in higher education rankings. In December, it received a $38 million donation from philanthropist MacKenzie Scott — it’s largest donation ever. It’s also still physically growing. Right now, there’s construction projects underway for a medical education building and several more office buildings.
But there are still bumps in the road as the university campus looks toward its future. Student enrollment has stagnated for several years. Educational attainment in the wider Valley region has hardly increased compared to what it was before the university opened. And the region’s economic growth has shown mixed results.
These outcomes so far pose questions about what the future holds for the state’s youngest UC campus.
The rise of a ‘public serving institution’
The idea for a new University of California campus began percolating in the 1980s. The search for a new university site started after leaders in the UC system noticed projected student enrollment exceeded capacity across the nine established campuses.
After looking at different regions in the state, the UC Board of Regents narrowed its list to several locations in the San Joaquin Valley in hopes a university would boost regional success.
“In addition to expanding enrollment capacity for the UC system, UC Merced was intended to help raise educational and economic outcomes in the San Joaquin Valley,” the Legislative Analyst’s Office report stated. “Prior to the opening of UC Merced, regional college-going rates were low while regional poverty and unemployment rates were high.”
The three locations the Regents considered were in Merced, Fresno and Madera counties. From there, Bob Carpenter, a member of the University Committee of Merced, said it became a seven-year competition: Who could win over both the Regents and the locals?
“We basically ran a campaign, and if you want to view it like a political race, there were three candidates, and we were one of the candidates,” Carpenter said. “We simply promoted ourselves as a community and as a location for it — and it proved successful.”
By 1995, Carpenter said, Merced came out on top. He believes the Regents chose the location, he said, because of the community support and the vast piece of land donated by the Virginia Smith Trust.
In 2004, the campus opened up to its first graduate class, and by 2005, undergraduate students attended for the first time.
Since then, the public university has knocked out a number of foundational milestones.
At an October event celebrating its first 20 years, Chancellor Juan Sánchez Muñoz listed off the university’s achievements in rankings, economic income, and research.
A Beacon Economics study commissioned by the UC found the campus’s economic impact is over $1 billion annually in Merced County and more than $1 billion statewide, Muñoz said.
“UC Merced supports one in every 15 jobs in Merced County and more than 8,600 jobs across California,” Muñoz said during his speech.
Among university rankings, U.S. News & World Report and the Wall Street Journal ranked UC Merced the third best university for social mobility, which Munoz said “measures students' improvement of their economic and social standing through knowledge, skills, and opportunity.”
The university is also classified as a Carnegie R1 institution, which is a classification given only to universities who spend $50 million or more on research. Some of that research largely benefits the Valley.
Most recently, UC Merced and UC Santa Cruz research led to solar panel installments over irrigation canals in the San Joaquin Valley. The move generates a ton of clean energy and reduces water waste from evaporation.
Additionally, Edward Flores, the faculty director of the UC Merced Community and Labor Center, said research from his team helped secure $20 million in flood relief funding from the state budget for the small Merced County community of Planada.
The unincorporated community was ravaged by historic flooding in early 2023. Legislators secured the funding only after Flores and his colleagues knocked on doors to collect more than 200 survey responses and produced an analysis on the flood’s economic impacts.
“Most (83%) Planada households experienced at least one form of economic loss following the flood, whether through missed work or property damaged as a result of the flood. At the same time, it also finds that most households did not have access to key forms of disaster aid following the flood,” a summary of the findings stated.
The UC also produced a tool kit for natural disasters at the request of the state’s Office of Emergency Services, Flores said. Research like this, he said, is what the university was built for.
“When that disaster happened, it was heartbreaking to see,” Flores said. “We’re a public-serving institution… we have to be able to do something.”
Mixed reviews on university’s 20 years
When California’s Legislative Analyst’s office released its report last year on UC Merced’s first two decades, it highlighted an analysis with mixed results.
On the negative end, the report found student enrollment has stalled, flatlining over the last few years at around 9,000 students. Because of lagging enrollment and a lack of local funding, the campus relies on more state funding than any other University of California campus.
The analysis also found educational outcomes in the region still fall below state averages, even though they’ve increased in recent years due to the UC’s placement. Employment rates remain low and poverty is still high in the Valley, according to the report, but wages in state government workers in Merced County have seen an increase.
Rep. Adam Gray, D-Merced, who is an instructor at the university, criticized the analysis and believes it would encourage an effort to take money away from the Valley.
“If LA wants more money, they want to take it away from the Central Valley. If San Francisco wants more money, they want to take it away from the Central Valley,” Gray said. “The bottom line is these are people trying to take resources from a community that deserves resources, a community that I represent and that I'm very proud of.”
Emeralda Soria, a state legislator who represents Merced County, also said the report was not fair because the institution was compared against other well-established University of California campuses.
“For me, there has to be a comparison that is apples to apples,” Soria said. “That initial report was a little short-sighted.”
The LAO report mentioned Merced’s challenges in enrollment targets are not unprecedented. UC Santa Cruz and UC Irvine also didn’t reach their initial enrollment targets in their early years.
Tom Hothem, another founding professor at UC Merced who teaches writing courses, said he’s heard a spectrum of feelings about UC Merced from those who work and live in the Valley.
“People in this region have wanted us to serve the region more quickly and more than what was something we could really do,” Hothem said.
The push for more change and progress, Malloy said, has added pressure that he feels hurts students and employees who work at the campus.
“Our funding depends on enrollment, and so we have been pushed from the very beginning to grow our size,” Malloy said. “And while that is an admirable goal, I think sometimes the growth has come at the expense of taking care of the people who are here already.”
Despite the criticism, those in the community still see a bright side to the UC. Soria told KVPR the Valley is definitely better off with the campus, than it would be without.
“It continues to be a beacon of hope, especially in dark times, that there was a commitment made by leaders way before me to invest in an area that historically had been disinvested in,” Soria said.
Carpenter, who is one of the people who advocated for the university before Soria, said the profit is obvious because every time a student graduates from UC Merced, it’s a positive outcome.
Carpenter acknowledged the university still has a long way to go.
Gray, Carpenter and other community leaders who spoke to KVPR about the university’s anniversary, said no one can be too hard on the university because in retrospect, it’s still young.
“You know, 20 years seems like a long time, but in a university's life, it's a blink of an eye,” Carpenter said. “My perspective is a university is a 200-year plus effort. So, don't get too excited about the first 10% of it.”
What happens at 40? A booming hub for health, agriculture
When asked if they could imagine what the university will look like 20 years from now, leaders and professors’ ideas ranged from thousands of more graduates to substantial growth in agricultural innovation.
“I always tell people, there's a reason that where Stanford and Berkeley and research universities are, you find things like Google and Apple and Intel,” Gray told KVPR. “The research universities create the innovations that spur these amazing companies, right? So to have one here in Central California, where we have the greatest agricultural valley in the world, it's an opportunity to spur innovation in that space in a really cool way – and you'll see it.”
Gray said he’s seen what UC Merced students can do in the classroom, and that makes him even more excited for what’s to come.
“You spend a day with them, and you think for all of our problems, for all of our disagreements, for all of our challenges, we've got wonderful people in this country,” he said.
Carpenter predicted UC Merced will graduate thousands more students, many who are the first in their families’ to attend college.
“If nothing else, it'll allow people… to stay in Merced and have a wonderful career without having to say, ‘Well, I got to find something else in San Francisco or the Bay Area,’” he said.
Malloy, despite his critiques, still believes the UC can do great things.
He recalled attending the early graduation ceremonies. The classes were small, so Malloy said students would walk on stage with their parents — some of whom showed up in their work clothes straight from working in the fields.
Watching moments like that, he said, are why he still teaches at the UC 20 years later.
“Not just educating them, but being there for them, being present for them and wanting to be a positive part of their journey,” he said. “That was, and remains, I think, a really moving part of this job.”
