Chula Vista’s long and often humbling effort to get a top university to establish a major presence in South County might become a reality on a scale far larger than many people imagined.
Local politicians and educators are proposing to build a super-campus on the eastern edge of the city where large satellites of UC San Diego, San Diego State University and Cal State San Marcos would share buildings, creating the region’s first large higher education hub.
The tenants also might include Chula Vista’s Southwestern College, a two-year community college that is emerging as an incubator for bachelor-degree level programs offered by visiting university faculty.
South County has half a million residents — about the population of Atlanta — and no full-service university of its own. But for years it’s been trying to attract one.
The proposed project, one of the few of its kind in the nation, is being led by Assemblymember David Alvarez, who says it’s possible the first phase of the campus could open in 2030 — if ers can raise upwards of $300 million and agree on a governance plan.
Chula Vista is finishing a report that calls for building three academic buildings, an istration building and a student union on a small portion of the 383-acre site the city owns near the Millenia urban village east of Interstate 805.
This would be the first step in creating what the city calls the University Innovation District, meant to eventually host 20,000 students, 6,000 faculty and staff and lots of housing, with room for science and tech companies and restaurants.
The idea to have one campus host many universities is largely modeled after the Auraria Campus, a 150-acre site in downtown Denver that is home to two public universities and a community college that collectively serve 38,000 students.
The schools, which represent the three tiers of higher education in Colorado, share many buildings, services and some property and collaborate on research, in a project that over the decades helped revitalized a once run-down area of Denver.
Chula Visa is taking on a big challenge.
“We’re going to create something that doesn’t exist in California,” said Alvarez, an SDSU graduate who chairs the Assembly Budget Subcommittee on Education Finance. “To get people to think about something different and unique is challenging.”
It’s a dream that comes with a caveat.
“(We’re) currently pursuing a multi-institutional campus,” said City Manager Maria Kachadoorian. “However, there is nothing in our current planning that would limit our ability to pivot if a viable single university partner were to indicate interest in the site.”
Chula Vista has been trying for more than 30 years to attract one or more universities to fast-growing South County, an area that stretches from San Ysidro to National City. It has unsuccessfully lobbied the state to place a University of California and a California State University campus in the region.
The city also failed to stir in 2006 when it drafted plans for a sprawling center for higher education, research and technology park on city land. At the time, the region had few sizable science and tech companies. That plan didn’t clearly explain how the project would be funded and did little to show the public what it would look like.
But Chula Vista’s courtship of universities reached its nadir about five years ago, when it tried and failed to establish a partnership with the University of Saint Katherine, a San Marcos school with barely 230 students. USK went out of business last year.
The situation started to change in 2023, when Alvarez began a stronger push for attracting universities — motivated, he says, by constituents’ desire to take bachelor’s degree programs locally.
That coincided with Southwestern’s plan to build a center — set to open this fall — where visiting universities can offer in-person courses. UC San Diego has indicated it might begin to offer a bachelor’s program in public health there as early as next year, and SDSU is also considering introducing some kind of programs next year.
Their new frankness is no accident. UCSD and SDSU have been discussing their plans publicly in part because of language Alvarez added to last year’s state budget that requires them to outline how they might expand into South County.
Neither UCSD Chancellor Pradeep Khosla nor SDSU President Adela de la Torre was available for comment.
Initially, the big player at Southwestern will be CSUSM, which says it will phase in five bachelor’s degree programs at Southwestern over the next two years.
Ellen Neufeldt, the school’s president, has experience with such things. She used to be an executive in the University of Maryland system, where students at nine campuses can also choose from 80 degree programs offered by the Universities at Shady Grove, an academic partner in Montgomery County.
Neufeldt believes CSUSM, SDSU and UCSD would get along and complement each other academically if they were all to become t tenants at the Chula Vista site.
“When we were going into the pandemic, the campuses in this region got together on Zoom to help one another out,” Neufeldt said. “This kind of collaboration has really been a hallmark of the San Diego region.”
But there are more immediate issues. It has yet to be determined who would govern the proposed campus, how it would be financed, what it would look like and who would serve as its prime developer.
Chula Vista has fallen behind schedule in finishing a report estimating the cost to build the first phase. Its contractor has produced renderings that have been shared with city officials. The city declined to share them with The San Diego Union-Tribune.
The report is expected to be released in August.
Meanwhile, Alvarez is pursuing legislation that would create a governing board that would likely include the three universities, Southwestern, the city of Chula Vista and other partners.
The proposed South County Higher Education Task Force would present a plan to the Legislature by July 1, 2027.
