It's boom time again at Cal State San Marcos, thanks to big money, biotech and a building blitz

Big donations are rolling in. Enrollment will likely set a record this fall. A 555-bed student village is taking shape. And construction of a massive science and engineering center is expected to follow.

Once again, Cal State San Marcos, which saw enrollment drop by 1,258 during the pandemic, is in the midst of a boom. This new one could be the largest and most consequential yet for a 35-year-old school with dreams of becoming the state's next STEM powerhouse.

There will definitely be a happy buzz during next weekend's commencement. CSUSM has pushed enrollment comfortably above 15,000, placing itself on the list of large American universities. It could hit 20,000 within a decade.

The school's physical growth also is notable. A planned 11-story dorm and other buildings will help create a skyline in San Marcos, now dominated by a sprawl of tract homes, bisected by busy state route 78.

The university sees itself as the heart of North County, home to1.2 million people. The school also draws from southern Orange and southwestern Riverside counties, adding to the school's commuter culture.

"Our region needs everyone from nurses and teachers to engineers, entrepreneurs and social and life scientists," said Ellen Neufeldt, who is finishing her fifth year as CSUSM's president. "That's in our DNA. That's how we transform our communities."

A chorus of business leaders, educators and alumni say the university is humming because of Neufeldt, a cheerful, plain-spoken leader who, like a neutrino, never stops moving.

They credit the 55-year-old Tennessean with focusing on three key areas: philanthropy, public-private partnerships and deepening the school's ties to nearby Camp Pendleton, the largest Marine base on the West Coast.

The rainmaker

As a percentage of the school's budgets, the amount of money California's public universities get from the state for operating costs has plummeted over the years, forcing schools to turn to private donors for help.

CSUSM is fairly new to hunting whales, as big donors are known. But in March it received separate $10 million gifts from two of San Diego's top donors, Price Philanthropies and the couple Daniel and Phyllis Epstein, whose property management-ownership firm, CONAM , operates about 50,000 homes nationwide.

Collectively, the money represents the largest gifts in school history. They have energized CSUSM's five-year, $100 million capital campaign that will likely end in late 2027.

The Price money will be used to create three-year accelerated bachelor degree programs in health that will be open to high school students as well traditional undergraduates, to give them a jump start in higher education. The university is flanked by large high schools.

There will be a mental health track that will train people to become, among other things, family therapists, substance use counselors and school psychologists. A second track will produce community health workers, social service assistants and case managers.

CSUSM is focusing on these areas in part because the San Diego Workforce Partnership reported in 2021 that the county needed to add 18,500 behavioral health professionals from 2022-27.

There's another big factor: The number of people 65 and older in North County rose by more than a third in the past five years, creating greater demand for health and medical services.

Epstein's money will be spread more widely across the university. The largest slice — $2.5 million — will promote engineering programs.

It also could help pay for the school's biggest need — a 100,000-square-foot science and engineering building currently ranked as the top academic building priority in the entire California State University system.

CSUSM says the center would enable it to serve 2,000 engineering majors — up more than sixfold from the roughly 300 it now serves. The center would also expected to help the university double its research funding to about $50 million over a five-year period.

There's a huge demand for engineers and computer scientists, says the North County Economic Development Council. The region is home to major companies like Viasat in Carlsbad, which provides satellite internet and other communications services, and its neighbor ThermoFisher Scientific, a leader in analytical instruments and diagnostics and pharmaceutical services.

Nearly half of CSUSM's engineering graduates are Latino, almost twice the share of such graduates across the entire CSU. And more than half of the school's students graduating this year with a bachelor's degree will be the first in their family to do so.

This sort of social mobility appeals to Dan Epstein, who is 85.

"Changing lives is important," said Epstein, who donates to many universities. "That's why I'm supporting the school now."

He's urged others to do the same, including David Brenner, who raised $2 billion for UC San Diego when he was vice chancellor of health sciences. He's now president of Sanford Burnham Prebys, an elite biomedical research center in La Jolla.

Brenner is currently working on an agreement that will place CSUSM students in paid summer internships at SPB, and he will try to guide some of them into the institute's graduate school of biomedical sciences.

"We can give them lab experience," Brenner said.

He's effectively telling the massive life-sciences industry in San Diego not to overlook CSUSM when searching for talent.

Downtown crossing

All this expansion has heightened the demand for housing from students, many of whom commute from such cities as Temecula and Murrieta. The university had room for 2,000 students last fall. It could have filled twice as many beds if it had them.

"The commute was something I was worried about, because I wasn't used to driving that long," said Isaiah Molina, a graphic design major who makes a 78-mile round-trip drive from his home in Murrieta. "But I've come to see it as a small sacrifice to get the experience and opportunities I've been having."

The university is trying to partly ease such worries through its partnership with Sea Breeze Properties, which is developing North City, an educational, residential and recreational district that involves a deep partnership with the university. It intends to become basically a three-block downtown for San Marcos.

"(CSUSM) was looking for more housing, and we said, 'Hi, we've got entitlements across the street,'" recalls Darren Levitt, vice president of Sea Breeze. "There's a vitality, an energy, a vibrancy that campuses create that are great spinoffs for development."

Using its own money, Sea Breeze built two villages that house more than 1,200 students. The students pay for the housing and the university operates the facilities through an affiliation agreement. The developer plans to add an 11-story tower that will house another 500 students. And it is currently constructing a 12-story private apartment complex that will have 458 units to house about 1,000 people.

Soon, roughly 3,300 people could live in this small district, which now also has restaurants, entertainment venues and CSUSM's huge Extended Learning building, which features classrooms as well as labs used by startup companies. A Sprinter train station is located nearby.

The district resembles University Town Center, the village the Irvine Co. built across the street from UC Irvine.

"I can't say enough about North City," said Neufeldt, who is currently building a 555-bed housing complex on campus, a short distance away.

This growth is welcomed by Max Villalobos, chief operating officer for Kaiser Permanente's North County operations. Kaiser opened a major medical center in San Marcos last summer, about a mile from CSUSM, with 1,200 employees.

"We are constantly in need of new staff, whether it is nurses, respiratory therapists or physical therapists," he said. "We also need scientists and engineers. The university will be a feeder school for us. And the housing going up (in North City) can be places for our people to live."

Tapping the military

On any given weekday, there are about 80,000 residents and visitors at Camp Pendleton, the sprawling Marine base northwest of San Marcos. Many of the Marines are college-age people interested in taking college courses.

CSUSM has long had a relationship with the base, but the ties don't run particularly deep. The university wasn't even mentioned in the 2023 " Best for Vets " college roundup, an annual assessment of more than 300 schools put together by Military Times, an influential news organization.

Things have started to change under Neufeldt, who came to San Marcos from Old Dominion University — a school in Norfolk, Va., home to the world's largest Navy complex, where 25 percent of the student body has an affiliation with the military.

CSUSM is preparing to begin sending faculty to the base to teach cybersecurity, one of the hottest fields in the military. It's also working to extend a program in which student veterans get help establishing careers in sustainable energy, a major industry in San Diego County. And the school got the Marines to mentor some of its electrical engineering students.

The campus' Epstein Family Veterans Center is being cited as a positive in the university's fund raising efforts. The school has established a military advisory council to help it connect not only with the Marines but with the massive Navy presence in San Diego. And in a potentially big step, Neufeldt has said CSUSM will establish an Army ROTC program on campus.

None of that, however, be an end point. While discussing the university's history with the military, Neufeldt said, simply, "We can do better."

This story originally appeared in San Diego Union-Tribune .