A state assemblyman introduced a bill Monday to create a University of California campus that would cater to science and technology, akin to the California Institute of Technology.
Assemblyman Mike Gatto, a Democrat from Glendale, proposed Assembly Bill 1483 because he thinks the current UC campuses are overcrowded and cannot provide enough degrees in the science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics fields of study, or STEAM.
Gatto said in the statement that he thinks the creation of a new UC campus would give students a chance to get an advanced technological education comparable to Caltech at a cheaper price.
“Tech and creative jobs are the future, yet too many California students are unable to get the education they need here in California,” Gatto said in the statement.
Neither Gatto nor the UC were available for comment on proposed legislation. The UC does not typically comment on legislation unless it conducts an extensive review.
The project would seek to provide a new wave of students with STEAM degrees who could take on jobs that require creative or techological skills, the statement said.
The UC awarded about 16,000 undergraduate degrees in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, or STEM, fields in the 2013-2014 academic year, according to a Legislative Analyst’s Office report.
The bill would ask the UC to study the feasibility and potential locations for the campus, and allocate $50 million to acquire land and to fund initial building costs. The cost of building a campus would far exceed that amount, however.
UC Merced, the most recently created University campus, opened in 2005. Before the opening of UC Merced, no UC campus had been established for 40 years.
Gatto told the Los Angeles Times Monday that he would prefer the campus to be either in the L.A. area or close to Silicon Valley, though he said it would be up to the UC Board of Regents to determine the final location.
For the 2014-2015 academic year, the UC saw an overall 5.8 percent increase in applications, with more than 190,000 students applying to at least one of the nine undergraduate campuses, according to the UC Office of the President.
UCLA has also seen a swell in applicants in recent years. By 2014, UCLA had received more than 85,000 incoming freshman applications, an increase of 19 percent from 2012. UCLA admitted about 16,000 freshman applicants in 2014.
A Legislative Analyst’s Office report said the UC has been accepting about 13 percent of California’s public high school graduates, beyond the top-12.5 percent required by California’s Master Plan for Higher Education. However, UCLA and UC Berkeley have seen the greatest demand for enrollment, with those two campus accepting less than 20 percent of applicants in 2014.
If the bill passes, Legislative Analyst’s Office would have until Jan. 1, 2017 to publish a report on the feasibility of creating the new campus.
Compiled by Julia Raven, Bruin staff.
the raven is watching the cat 🙂
They should make UC Merced the science and technology campus. It has the space to spread out, the proximity to Silicon Valley, and the students won’t care that its location doesn’t have much in terms of immediate entertainment- they’ll all be inside studying anyway. The area could use the boost, operational costs are low already, and they could use that proposed $50M initial investment to update the science facilities and recruit faculty. No need to acquire land when there’s already an established [new] campus that has yet to reach potential.
This sounds like a pet/legacy project for Assemblyman Mike Gatto.