University of California, Merced
On May 19, 1988, the Regents of the University of California voted to begin planning to place a campus in the San Joaquin Valley due to an increase in the number of students at the other campuses. On May 19, 1995, the Board of Regents chose Merced as the location for the system's tenth campus. In 2001, the university used an $11 million grant from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation to buy a 7,300 acre plot of land next to Lake Yosemite just north of Merced. This was the largest land purchase by the University of California for one of its campuses.