• printer friendly
• mail this article
• iPod format
• digg

A 12-1 student-to-faculty ratio.

A student body that is 7 percent black and 25 percent Hispanic.

Space in the on-campus residence halls at UC Merced for all students who want it, two full residence halls empty and parking for all students living on campus, which totals about 400.

“Obviously, parking is provided for people living in the dorms,” said Alex Chiu, a first-year transfer computer science and engineering student at UC Merced.

UC President Robert Dynes announced Thursday the appointment of an acting chancellor, veteran academic administrator Roderic Park, and the university is in the process of looking for a permanent chancellor.

But there the similarities between the new Merced campus and the 87-year-old Westwood campus end.

“(UC) Merced is literally three buildings,” Chiu said, adding that there is a library, a science and engineering building and a classroom building in addition to the residence facilities.

There are currently about 1,300 students at Merced, between 500 and 600 of them entering this fall.

And that number is lower than that of last year’s incoming class and far fewer than Merced officials had expected to enroll, which explains the empty residence halls.

As a new campus, UC Merced does not have the services that are available at other campuses, which Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs Jane Lawrence said was a factor in Merced’s lowered enrollment.

The gym has yet to open, she said, and some students said that because of the school’s small size, some courses and majors are still not available.

“They don’t offer a lot of (classes),” said Julia Clark, a second-year math student at UC Merced. “I don’t know if I’m going to be able to graduate in four years because they don’t offer enough math classes.”

Mike Oliviera, a second-year bio-engineering student, said some students find this lack of majors a deterrent.

“Since we don’t have that many (majors), it really shuts off a lot of people,” he said.

But inconsistent enrollment numbers, a small campus and empty space in the surrounding area may not have been so foreign to students attending UCLA during its first years in Westwood.

UC Merced students described Merced as a small, unexciting town too far from the campus to visit in an easy walk on foot.

“The city itself is very empty,” said Clark. “It’s hard to get around.”

When the first UCLA buildings went up in 1919, dirt and hills stretching for miles stood in place of the restaurants, stores, parking lots and housing that marks the area now.

And though UCLA’s enrollment figures started higher than Merced’s have, UCLA experienced similar fluctuations in enrollment counts during its first years – in fact, its first decades – as a campus.

In 1919, when the Westwood campus opened at the Southern California branch of the University of California, it enrolled 1,375 students.

By the time the campus had become the University of California at Los Angeles in 1927, it had 6,011 students.

After that, UCLA’s enrollment numbers were inconsistent – a year with more than 6,000 students enrolled would be followed by a year with around 5,700, and then two years later the numbers would jump again.

It was not until 1946, coinciding with the end of World War II, that UCLA’s enrollment jumped and stayed high.

More recently, UC Santa Cruz went through a similar experience to that of UC Merced. Lawrence pointed to the statistics from the early years of UC Santa Cruz, the second most recent campus to open, which are similar to UC Merced’s.

But UCLA and, to a lesser extent, UC Santa Cruz did not face some of the challenges that come with being in competition with other schools.

“All of the other campuses actually upped their enrollment, which actually took away from Merced,” Oliviera said. “Half the state doesn’t even know where Merced is.”

But though UC Merced students said they could understand why students would be wary of attending a school with fewer majors and resources than other schools, they emphasized the positives of attending a small school.

“You get a UC education in a private-sized class,” Chiu said.

And Chiu said he is optimistic that as the school grows larger and more established, the problems that come along with its current size will diminish.