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A group of educators and business people is working to bring a four-year university to the Temecula Valley.
The Southwest Riverside County Higher Education Coalition wants to convert part of a building on Mt. San Jacinto College’s Temecula Valley campus into the only four-year college or university in the region.
The group began pursuing that goal after it was unable to persuade state officials to allow Mt. San Jacinto College, a community college with approximately 30,000 students, to grant a four-year degree, said Dr. Lisa Deforest, the coalition’s chair.
However, the 50-member coalition came up with another idea, one that appears to be gathering some community support: Establishing a satellite campus of Cal State San Marcos on Mt. San Jacinto College’s Temecula Valley campus.
Coalition members have conducted monthly meetings for the past 14 months, raising $6.5 million during that time. They also have a fundraiser scheduled to be held April 18 at the Pechanga Resort & Casino, where they hope to raise another $1 million.
“Much of the (Temecula Valley) community is getting behind what we’re trying to do,” said DeForest, a member of the the Murrieta City Council. “We had about 40 people at our last monthly meeting. More people are starting to understand that this is something the community really needs.”
The satellite facilities will be located on one floor of an empty five-story tower called the University Center. The floor will be converted into classrooms, conference rooms and faculty offices, at an estimated cost of $18 million, said Andrea Pasolini, spokeswoman for Mt. San Jacinto College.
Cal State San Marcos is fully accredited, so the main obstacle to setting up the satellite campus is raising the retrofitting money. The tower has sat vacant since Mt. San Jacinto bought it from Irvine-based Abbott Laboratories in 2017.
Classes will include nursing, computer science, speech pathology, and early childhood development. Those classes could start as soon as 2027 or 2028, depending on how quickly the funding can be raised.
“The curriculum will train people for whatever the community needs, and there’s plenty of of room for expansion if we need it,” Pasolini said. “But for now we’re only looking at one floor.”
The proposal has received a strong endorsement from Roger Schultz, Mt. San Jacinto College’s president and superintendent.
“The expansion of Cal State University San Marcos’ programs will help us develop a comprehensive curriculum in fields such as nursing, business, education, and STEM,” Schultz said in a statement. “This is about more than growing a campus. It’s about investing in our community’s future, keeping talent here, and fueling economic vitality in one of California’s fastest-growing areas.”
In a promotional video posted on YouTube, Schultz said the campaign to bring a public four year university to Southwest Riverside County is happening because some community members, particularly businesses, see the need for local access to a bachelor’s degree.
“It will bring programs, courses and degrees to our community, and we will not have [people] leaving the area to pursue their higher education goals,” Schultz says in the video. “It’s also an opportunity to take advantage of the space that’s available in the University Center.”
That arrangement would allow students to attend Mt. San Jacinto College – a community college that opened in 1962 – for two years, then spend two years studying for a bachelors’s degree on the Cal State San Marcos satellite campus.
The primary reason the ad hoc coalition is trying to bring a four-year university to Southwest Riverside County will sound familiar to anyone familiar with higher education in the Inland Empire: not enough people who live in Riverside and San Bernardino counties have four-year degrees, and too many of those who do possess four-year degrees pursue their careers outside of the two-county region.
Only 21 percent of the Inland Empire’s population that is 25 years older has a bachelor’s degree, compared to the national average of 54 percent, according to data compiled by Forbes magazine.
And, despite its relatively large student body, only 30 percent of Mt. San Jacinto College’s graduates pursue a four-year degree. One reason for that is that the two closest four-year universities – UC Riverside and Cal State San Bernardino – are both about 40 miles from Temecula Valley.
“We’re in a fast-growing area, but we’re underserved as far as college graduates are concerned,” DeForest said. “We need a four-year university, because Riverside and San Bernardino are both too long a drive for most of the people who live in the region.
“We have a lot of potential college graduates in this part of the Inland Empire, but there’s no place for them to go to school.”
DeForest acknowledged that the coalition is short of its fundraising goal, but she said there are plenty of places where the group can raise money.
Supervisor Chuck Washington, whose district includes Temecula Valley, has secured $5.5 million for the project with revenue the county received from the American Rescue Plan Act, the 2021 legislation meant for local governments cope with the pandemic.
The remaining $1 million raised by the coalition came from the city of Temecula, and there are plenty of other state and federal sources that can be tapped, along with the private sector, according to DeForest.
“We’re going to get the entire board of supervisors involved in this, and we’re going to after state funding,’’ DeForest said. “The state of California always seems to come up with funding sources for education.”
