A ‘communiversity’? Sac State and Sierra College sign commitment to joint Placer County campus

Confirming their joint partnership to build a “communiversity” in Placer County, the presidents of Sacramento State and Sierra College participated in a signing ceremony Friday, where officials from both campuses and the county gathered to celebrate.

Presidents Luke Wood of Sac State and Willy Duncan of Sierra College, a community college in Rocklin, agreed to public commitments of staffing and resources to build the Placer Center.

The west Roseville campus, which will be at the intersection of Sunset Boulevard and Fiddyment Road, near Thunder Valley Casino Resort, is a combination of both schools. The recent partnership signing is the furthest the decades-long project has reached in planning phases.

“The seed got planted in the early 2000s; it sure took a long time to sprout but now it’s really coming to fruition,” Senior Associate Vice President for Placer Center Vajra Watson said. “We’ve accomplished almost more in this year than in many ways we’ve done in decades past.”

Planning for the Placer Center goes back to meetings between Sacramento State leadership and land owner Eli Broad, in 2000, and to Sierra College and the California State University campus announcing their plans to collaborate in 2014.

Now, decades-old plans are starting to solidify, through the signing ceremony and with the CSU Board of Trustees approving the plans this past January.

At the Placer Center, students will have dual enrollment in both Sierra College and Sac State, a model coined a “communiversity” by the presidents and the first of its kind in California.

On paper, students would transfer from Sierra College to Sac State while taking classes at the Placer Center with professors from both institutions, but Wood said that the process would be seamless.

“The idea of this model is that we have such integration and partnership that students don’t know whether or not they’re with Sierra College, whether or not they’re with Sacramento State because it doesn’t matter, because they’re with the Placer campus,” Wood said during the ceremony.

Transfer students a priority

The partnership is also designed with hopes of making the transfer process easier for students, who typically have to make sure they are taking all of the right transfer classes and apply to get into universities, having to “wait and hope they get in,” Duncan said.

Currently, Sac State has the fifth-highest transfer rate in the state, according to Wood, which he predicts will change with this partnership.

“I’m going to make a bold statement that we will be the No. 1 transfer university in the state,” Wood said in an interview after the signing.

Officials also point to the high number of students from the Placer County region who commute to Sac State every day, which they estimate is close to 5,000, as part of their motivation for wanting a connecting campus.

Partnership between the two schools is nothing new, which Wood and Duncan emphasized in their speeches, but this format of collaboration is.

Duncan also hopes that the partnership will make higher education more accessible to the greater Placer County region, along with students who typically commute or transfer from Sierra College to a university.

“This idea of a communiversity is something that is taking hold,” Duncan said. “The concept that a community college and a CSU campus can work together in this way, I think is a model that is going to be looked at in the future as the way people are going to access education.”

To transition into having students enrolled at both schools, Duncan said that Sierra plans to pilot a concurrent enrollment program at their Rocklin campus with Sac State.

What else will be built near Placer Center?

Duncan added that Placer County is one of the fastest growing regions in California, which he said makes this project an important investment into the future of the community.

The campus is planned to be part of a larger community development called Placer One which is still in planning phases but is intended to house neighborhoods, a shopping center, parks and a town center.

In March 2023, officials approved a $28 million sewer line, a vital infrastructure piece necessary to build both the Placer Center and the proposed Placer One development, a 2,200-acre community.

The Placer Center will be built on land donated to the project by Broad, a longtime supporter of higher education.

Dr. Melissa Leal, the tribal liaison for Sierra College, said a land acknowledgment at the beginning of the signing ceremony, to recognize that the Placer Center is being built on Nisenan and Miwok land.

Earlier this year, Leal organized a land blessing with Elder Alan Wallace from the Nisenan tribe that occurred on the site of the future Placer Center.

Under the presidential agreement signed Friday, Sierra College agreed to use Measure E funds to “catalyze construction” and complete Phase 1 of the project, which will accommodate 1,500 to 2,000 students.

Ultimately, with Phase 3 of the development, the campus intends to accommodate 12,000 full-time students, or 20,000 students with 80% attending part-time.

“Just what this is going to do for higher ed and for our community, the access to education in our community, being able to get a CSU presence within Placer is probably something that you don’t get to work on every day,” Duncan said.

“Being able to think outside the box and get creative in the way we serve our students is the best part.”