Both the Southwestern College Governing Board and the Chula Vista City Council held their regularly scheduled meetings Tuesday evening.
Although both entities met separately, with each tackling their own issues, they did handle an item that would possibly move closer to bringing a four-year university to east Chula Vista.
On Tuesday the college and the city formed a taskforce to “coordinate the efforts of SWC and the city of Chula Vista to bring a university to the South Bay,” said SWC board president Tim Nader.
Representing SWC on the task force will be Nader and SWC trustee Norma Hernandez.
Chula Vista Mayor Mary Casillas Salas and Councilwoman Pat Aguilar will represent the city.
SWC President Kindred Murillo and Chula Vista’s assistant city manager Maria Kachadoorian will designate staff support for their respective entities.
The university has been in the city’s plans for more than 26 years, but Nader said the momentum is starting to swing in the right direction.
“We are looking at a couple of options that actually look realistic,” he said. “I think this maybe the best opportunity we’ve had (in bringing a university) in a very long time.”
The first option is to bring a university-center type concept to Chula Vista similar to that of College of the Canyons where multiple universities share the use of facilities and real estate in offering degrees at that location.
Another option is for the city to create a binational university with an established Mexican university to setup an American campus and offer American degrees.
Chula Vista already has fully secured the 375-acre land needed to build a university and innovation district.
Casillas Salas said it is important to look at all options on the table for the university whether it’s a binational concept or one like the University of the Canyons or any other model.
The taskforce comes weeks after a recent joint meeting by the city and the college to hear a presentation by the College of the Canyons that uses a model where the community college cooperates with neighboring four-year institutions and able to offer bachelor of arts degrees and masters degrees.
Nader, the former Chula Vista mayor from 1991 to 1994, said when he was mayor he formed a taskforce to look into brining a Univerity of California to Chula Vista. Those plans fell apart when the UC System said that at the time they could not afford to have another school in its system.
A four-year university might still be a ways away but that is not stopping SWC from helping their students attend a local university.
Currently SWC has a partnership in place with Point Loma Nazarene University to offer a variety of bachelor’s degrees without leaving the SWC campus. Degrees offered through this partnership include a Bachelor of Science in Nursing; Bachelor of Arts in Child Development, and a Bachelor of Arts in criminal Justice.
Nader said not having a four-year university in South Bay is preventing opportunities for SWC students.
“Clearly, the lack of a four-year institution in our region is an impediment to higher education for a lot of students,” Nader said. “Many of our students are low-income, frankly a shocking number of them are either homeless or food insecure or single parents who are working to support their kids while they go to school and they don’t necessarily have the freedom that some of us might had to just go anywhere in the world that we chose to go. They need to go to a place that’s close to home.”
