Opening | September 5, 2005 |
Location | The university is just northeast of the city of Merced, Calif., a town of about 70,000 people in the San Joaquin Valley. It is an hour and 40 minutes’ drive from Yosemite National Park and two hours from the San Francisco Bay Area. |
Property | The main campus is being built on 910 acres, and the university has helped set aside more than 25,000 acres of environmentally sensitive wetlands near the campus for protection from development. The university also plans to build a 2,100-acre community, to include housing, retail businesses, and elementary and secondary schools, on land adjacent to the campus. |
Chancellor | Carol Tomlinson-Keasey, 62, a developmental psychologist who previously served as an administrator in the University of California system office and at the university’s Davis campus. |
Students | The university plans to open with 1,000 students, including 600 freshmen, 300 undergraduate transfer students, and 100 graduate students. It expects to increase enrollment by about 800 students annually, until it reaches 25,000, by about 2035. |
Faculty | Merced expects to hire 60 faculty members by its opening day. It plans to increase that number to more than 1,200 by the time the campus reaches its full size. |
Programs | The university will open with three schools: the School of Engineering, the School of Natural Sciences, and the School of Social Sciences, Humanities, and Arts. It has also created two interdisciplinary-research centers: the Sierra Nevada Research Institute and the World Cultures Institute. |
Budget | The institution has $33.8-million for 2004-5, with 86.5 percent coming from the state, 9.1 percent from private grants and donations, and 4.4 percent from federal research grants. In 2005-6, when 1,000 students are expected to enroll, the university estimates that it will receive $7.5-million more from the state, based on a per-student financing formula, and $6.5-million from student fees. |
Tuition | The cost is $6,141 for in-state undergraduates and $6,897 for in-state graduate students. |
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