loading . . . Construction has just about wrapped up at 525 12th St. in downtown Oakland, the new home of Samuel Merritt University, Oakland’s 116-year-old health sciences university.
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In a few weeks, movers will load 315 truckloads of furniture, academic papers, hospital mannequins and other clinical equipment, and drive a little more than a mile from Pill Hill to the university’s new campus, slated to officially open on Jan. 5, said President Ching-Hua Wang. When it opens, the university will bring 2,000 students and 500 faculty and staff to the city’s center. Finding a new campus for the school, which has outgrown the facilities it rents from Sutter Health, was one of Wang’s first charges when she became president in 2018.
City leaders are hopeful the move will revitalize downtown Oakland following a period marked by vacant storefronts and remote work policies that cleared out downtown streets.
“This is where we started,” Wang said while leading a tour for city and state officials on Thursday. “We want to extend our roots here.”
At a time when Oakland’s higher education landscape is shrinking — Holy Names University shuttered in 2023, Mills College faced declining enrollment and financial struggles before it became a satellite campus of Northeastern University, and the Peralta Community College District is considering a merger of its two Oakland campuses — the investment from SMU stands out. It’s also a sign that the healthcare education sector remains strong. The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics projects 1.9 million job openings each year in the health care sector over the next decade.
The 10-story, 250,000-square-foot building will include 41,000 square feet of simulation space — where students can practice scenarios in an authentic clinical environment — for aspiring healthcare professionals. SMU leaders hope to grow into the new campus, ultimately seeking to double the university’s enrollment to 4,000.
“We want to grow because there’s a staggering need for health science professionals and we have a severe shortage of nurses,” Wang said.
About 1,000 students graduate from SMU each year, most of them with a degree in nursing, she said. The vast majority of them — 94% — are hired in California. In 2021, Forbes ranked Samuel Merritt University as the college with the highest salary prospects for graduates with a bachelor’s degree, and a New York Times report showed SMU alumni with the highest median incomes among college grads a decade after graduating.
SMU’s new headquarters occupies what was the last remaining vacant parcel of Oakland’s 1970s-era city center redevelopment plan. The university owns the building and has signed a 99-year ground lease with the city.
SMU will celebrate its 117th anniversary on Jan. 26 and hold a grand opening ceremony for the new campus on Jan. 27, Wang said. The university invested $240 million to construct the building, financed with a $140 million bond and $100 million that the university raised.
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