More than 2,000 students move into UC Merced housing

Dylan Basco pushed a dolly cart loaded with clothes, books, video games and more books Sunday morning into the Cathedral Hall dormitory elevator, the first steps of his new college life.

His mother, Eva, said she would “absolutely not” get through the day without crying, as Dylan, the youngest of her three children, moved away.

“It’s exciting and it’s sad,” Eva Basco said. “Sad that he’s leaving home; exciting that he’s starting this new chapter of his life.”

Dylan’s father, Alex, wore a new UC Merced cap slightly askew as he pushed a large cart into his son’s dorm room.

“It’s a little stressful, moving,” Dylan Basco acknowledged while helping his father load an ironing board, laundry soap and still more clothes and books into the fourth-floor room.

Basco was one of more than 2,000 students who moved into campus housing Sunday morning for the fall semester.

The 18-year-old Oxnard native plans to major in mechanical engineering when classes begin Wednesday. He chose UC Merced for several reasons, but mostly, he said, he liked the fact the university is smaller than other major universities.

The intimately sized campus, while attractive for students such as Basco, is something university officials hope to change in the coming years. The college, which opened in 2005, is much smaller now than was originally conceived, acknowledged Brenda Ortiz, a UC Merced spokeswoman.

The school’s undergraduate population has grown each year and the university this year is the largest it’s ever been, with more than 6,700 students. More than 90 percent of those students are undergraduates, officials said.

Ortiz said while initial plans anticipated 25,000 students by 2025, “the budget crisis” over the past decade crushed that goal.

“The reality set in and that was just not possible. We need more buildings to get there,” she said in an interview Sunday. “We need more residence halls and academic buildings.”

Chancellor Dorothy Leland earlier this year reported a 14 percent increase in undergraduate applications for the fall semester – the greatest growth in the UC system. However, Leland said, the campus was forced to slow enrollment because of a shortage of infrastructure. UC Merced received 17,000 applications for fall of 2014 but had seats for fewer than 10 percent of its candidates.

University officials are working on new student population goals. A plan set to go before the UC Board of Regents in October calls for construction and other improvements that would bring 10,000 students to the Merced campus by 2020.

Planning in the coming months will likely be crucial to the future growth of the university.

But, for now at least, the small size of the campus can be used as a selling point to students such as Basco.

“Once I saw it (campus), I just liked it,” he said. “I liked everything about it.”

This story was originally published August 23, 2015 at 4:29 PM with the headline "More than 2,000 students move into UC Merced housing."