This story was originally published by EdSource.
Brian Arroyo decided to take a chance on UC Merced — a campus struggling to attract students to its remote location.
The Whittier native was admitted as a freshman in 2022. He had planned to stay close to home, so UC Merced’s location — about 300 miles north of Los Angeles in the heart of the San Joaquin Valley — gave him pause. But he was drawn to the idea of attending a UC, seeing Merced as offering the same academic rigor and research opportunities as other campuses, with less pressure.
“I thought if I came to Merced, I wouldn’t have to compete with the same number of students,” said Arroyo, who will graduate this spring with a degree in mechanical engineering.
UC Merced aims to attract students like Arroyo — those hoping to attend a top research university and willing to accept its location on the outskirts of Merced, surrounded by farmland, including a 6,500-acre reserve where cows often graze.
So far, students like Arroyo are the exception.
While several other UC campuses turn away tens of thousands of qualified students annually, Merced faces the opposite challenge and has struggled to find students willing to enroll.
The campus wants to grow enrollment, but despite doubling its physical size this decade with more housing, classroom space, laboratories and other facilities, its enrollment has hovered around 9,000 students for each of the past seven years. Its yield rate — the percentage of admitted students who choose to enroll — is the lowest in the UC system at 4%.
Merced, which opened its doors in 2005, once hoped to reach 15,000 students by 2030, but officials now speak of a more modest goal: reaching 10,000 within the next few years. Achieving that will be important not only for Merced but also for the UC system, which is relying on the campus to enroll more in-state residents and satisfy pressure from lawmakers to get more Californians into UC.
Campus officials believe they will see growth beginning this fall. Based on the number of freshmen and transfer students who have indicated intent to enroll, Merced is tracking above where it was at this point in 2025. The campus is continuing to build and expand programs, including a new partnership with UC San Francisco that allows students to work toward a bachelor’s degree at Merced and then an MD at UCSF’s Fresno campus.
UC Merced last year also achieved R1 status, the top research designation awarded by the Carnegie Foundation — and one that officials hope will improve the campus’s reputation with prospective students.
“We need to do a better job of communicating the benefits of the campus,” said Scott Hagg, UC Merced’s vice chancellor for enrollment management. “It’s just a matter of being authentic about who we are and who we are not. When students come to UC Merced, they’re going to look to be actively engaged in their academic program. But it’s not San Francisco. It’s not Los Angeles.”
‘It felt very secluded’
Merced isn’t the first new campus to struggle to meet its enrollment targets. In fact, that’s common for new campuses. The next two youngest UC campuses — Irvine and Santa Cruz — fell short of their enrollment projections for decades after they opened in 1965.
The biggest challenge for Merced, officials acknowledge, is its location.
When Julian Roma was deciding where to attend college in 2024, he considered Merced and was impressed with its programs in agricultural technology, so he decided to visit.
The five-hour drive from Roma’s hometown in San Diego to Merced, much of it through the San Joaquin Valley, was “not enjoyable,” he said. When he arrived at the campus, he was even more disappointed. Most of Merced’s restaurants, bars and shopping options are a 10- or 15-minute drive from the campus.
“It felt very secluded from every other good place in California,” said Roma. Roma, who loves the ocean and the beach, had trouble imagining how he would spend his free time in Merced. “I expected it to be less developed than San Diego, but I was not ready to live in a place like that, to be honest.”
Roma ended up enrolling at San Diego Mesa College, a community college, and plans to transfer this year to either UC San Diego or San Diego State University.
It’s not just students from San Diego and other coastal parts of California turning down Merced.
Yield rates are also low for students from San Joaquin Valley high schools, with many opting to attend a California State University campus or a community college near home, often because they want to stay close to family. Graduates of Fresno Unified School District, for example, are more likely to attend either Fresno State or Fresno City College than UC Merced, said Jeremy Ward, Fresno Unified’s assistant superintendent for college and career readiness.
“Do people here see Merced as a destination above Fresno? No, I don’t think that’s the case,” Ward said. He said district counselors regularly promote Merced as a viable option for students, but added that “these things take time. It has to build a culture within the community.”
The campus itself is still a work in progress. There is no student union building, though there are plans to open one by 2031 after a referendum was approved by students last year.
Some students, such as David Virden, however, say they appreciate the seclusion.
“If I was in a bigger city, I would never get anything done,” said Virden, who transferred last year from Los Medanos College, a community college in Contra Costa County. “Here, it’s isolated, it’s calm and quiet, and I feel like I can really focus and get the work done.”
Selling points
Campus leaders know other students want more of a traditional college feel. In 2024, the campus was annexed into the city of Merced, and there are plans to eventually turn vacant land around the campus into apartments and retail and commercial space.
In the short term, construction is in progress for a mixed-use complex just south of the campus that will feature student apartments on the upper floors and retail businesses on the first floor, including a boba shop, a pizza restaurant, a coffee shop and a grocery store.
“Ever since the campus came open, there’s always been that divide,” said Alyssa Johansen, a UC Merced spokesperson. “It hasn’t really been seen as part of the city, so we’re just trying to bridge that gap.”
There’s also construction underway on campus, including the Medical Education Building, a 200,000-square-foot facility expected to open this year that will house the new BS to MD program.
Students in the eight-year program will earn a bachelor’s degree in a science or health program at Merced before completing clinical training at UCSF Fresno and getting their MD. The program is meant to train future doctors in the San Joaquin Valley, and admissions priority is given to students from the Valley.
Demand for the program is expected to be high. “This is our crown jewel right now,” Johansen said.
Officials are also hopeful that the new R1 designation will be enticing to students. Johansen said “a big selling point” for students is that they can contribute to high-level academic research at Merced even as undergraduates.
The graduate student population at Merced is about 700 students, not large enough for faculty to rely solely on them for research assistance.
That was attractive to Arroyo, the student from Whittier studying mechanical engineering.
As a freshman, Arroyo worked with a graduate student measuring how power lines cause wildfires. To simulate the impact of downed power lines, Arroyo would drop torches onto dry grass collected from the region, including in Merced and the Yosemite Valley, and analyze whether and how fast fire would spread.
Hagg, the vice chancellor, said those types of opportunities aren’t as plentiful for undergraduates at other UC campuses.
“That’s something that’s going to be a regular occurrence for an incoming first-year student all the way through graduation, is to be involved in faculty research,” Hagg said. “I don’t think you can get anything better than that.”
Natalia Mochernak, a member of the EdSource California Student Journalism Corps, contributed to this report.