UC Merced - My fair state is in the process of building the 10th campus of the University of California system, in Merced, a wasteland just north of Fresno on I-5. While there is a California State University in Fresno, this new campus is intended to serve as the educational crown jewel for the booming population of the Central Valley. Currently, residents of Fresno and surrounding areas have to head north to UC Davis or south to UCLA to reach a campus that is relatively accessible. However, this article from the Fresno Bee astounded me when it reported that "[l]ast year, only 1,500 students from the 12-county Central Valley area went to any UC campus." That seems to me a remarkably low number in a state with a population of 30 million and with 197,000 students matriculated across all UC campuses. I'm hoping that building a university from scratch, where there's currently not a lot of interest, won't be a ruinous proposition.