In a feat that once seemed impossible, UC San Diego has raised a record $2 billion in private donations, helping the school expand at breakneck speed, underwrite research and tackle one of its biggest problems — the absence of a vibrant student life.

The campus gave itself a decade to come up with the money, but hit the mark three years early, spurred on by four $100 million gifts, the latest of which will enable scientists to search for the biological basis of empathy and compassion.

No other San Diego institution has ever raised as much private money for a similar purpose. And there’s more to come from the University of California San Diego, which has more than tripled its annual donations since its capital campaign began in 2012.

University executives said they will try to generate another $1 billion through 2022, some of which will help pay for a replacement hospital in Hillcrest. There’s also a big push to transform the campus from a commuter school into a residential oasis for more than half of its nearly 40,000 students.


A Target store is being added this summer. A Whole Foods might follow. A bowling alley is being considered. The school’s lonely arts district will be spruced up. And UC San Diego is creating a grand front entrance that’s meant to welcome not only students but the community at large.

Irwin M. Jacobs, the founding chairman and CEO Emeritus of Qualcomm, and his wife Joan Jacobs, have donated $100 million for UC San Diego’s current capital campaign. Their gift helped created Jacobs Medical Center. (Sam Hodgson/The San Diego Union-Tribune)

“I don’t want this to be just a great research university. I want it to be a great university — period,” said Chancellor Pradeep Khosla, who began the $2 billion campaign shortly after he arrived from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh seven years ago.

UC San Diego’s older sister campus — UCLA — started a campaign at the same time, hoping to raise $4.2 billion by late this year. It has since surpassed $5 billion, a symbol of the extraordinary amount of donations that colleges and universities are raising nationwide.


Collectively, these schools raised more than $47 billion in gifts last year, according to the Council for Advancement and Support of Education in Washington.

Even so, it was a daunting moment when UC San Diego decided to launch a campaign while the country was emerging from the Great Recession.

“We have done something that we did not imagine we could do,” said Khosla, who has experienced stumbles along with success.

The gifts helped create the Jacobs Medical Center, established one of the largest stem-cell research institutes on the West Coast, lifted the university’s study of consumer and industrial robots, and will enable an observatory in Chile to study the birth of the universe.


The money also is helping scientists search caves in Mexico for the remains of the first humans to inhabit the Americas, and made it possible for UC San Diego to partner with the San Diego Zoo on reproductive technologies for endangered rhino populations.

Donors helped the university check the health of coral reefs in Palau and begin to examine whether the century-old drug suramin can treat autism.

Millions have been raised for student scholarships, including $40,000 for Maria Triplett, who came from a low-income family in San Diego’s Chollas View neighborhood.

“Without that scholarship my story would be completely different,” said Triplett, who studies public health. “I definitely wouldn’t have been able to come here.”


UC San Diego senior Maria Triplett attends her summer psychology class in Peterson Hall on August 15, 2019 in San Diego, California. (Sam Hodgson/The San Diego Union-Tribune)

Money pressures

UC San Diego pursues private donations as much out of need as aspiration.

Over the past 20 years, the state slashed funding to the University of California and California State University, forcing the systems to look elsewhere for money at a time when enrollment was soaring.


Both systems raised tuition. Some schools also changed the mix of their student bodies for financial reasons. Many UC campuses threw open the doors to international students, who pay three times as much in tuition as California residents, helping schools balance their books.

The shift has been particularly noticeable at UC San Diego, where the number of international students rose by nearly 7,200 over the past decade. They now comprise about 25 percent of the school’s enrollment — up from 6 percent in 2008. The majority of the students are from China.

Although UC San Diego faces deep financial pressures, it has a big advantage when it comes to attracting gifts. Donors love to give money for health and medicine. And the university operates a medical school and two hospitals, and is among the largest academic medical researchers in the U.S.


Nearly $1.4 billion of the $2 billion is ear-marked for research and innovation, most of which will go to health and medicine. A Florida donor gave $25 million to help UC San Diego begin creating a School of Public Health. And a San Diego company gave $5 million for the study of sleep problems.

Khosla is being widely praised for the boom. But as he notes, it hasn’t been a singular achievement. And the surge began to come together before he arrived. To a large degree, it was sparked by Dr. David Brenner, UC San Diego’s vice chancellor for health sciences.

He guided architects in coming up with early drawings for a new medical center, and in 2010 appeared before the UCSD Foundation to describe what he envisioned.

“I felt that people shouldn’t have to go to Houston or L.A. for health care,” recalled Brenner. “They should be able to get everything they need at a state-of-the-art center in San Diego.”


Irwin Jacobs was in the audience and he represented what the school needed — an influential lead donor.

Jacobs had made a fortune as the co-founder of Qualcomm, the San Diego-based chipmaker. He had also served on the UC San Diego faculty and had donated generously to its engineering school.

He liked the hospital idea and became a key backer. In 2012, Jacobs and his wife, Joan, jumpstarted the campaign, donating $75 million for the Jacobs Medical Center. The couple later gave an additional $25 million, helping erase a construction budget shortfall.

Jacobs chuckles when he thinks of the center, saying, “Do you know who the first person was to be operated on there? I was.”

In an odd coincidence, he took ill just before the opening in 2016 and chose to be treated there.


Students in UC San Diego’s School of Engineering work on a virtual reality project for the Scripps Birch Aquarium in the EnVision Arts and Engineering Maker Studio on August 9, 2019. (Sam Hodgson / The San Diego Union-Tribune)

Calling all alumni

UC San Diego executives are grateful for the support of big-buck philanthropists like the Jacobses, Denny Sanford and Ernest Rady. But they say they’re going to have to greatly expand the number of gifts from alumni if they’re going to change the school’s culture and place the interests of students ahead of researchers.

Barely 4 percent of alumni make donations, a figure that’s slipped in recent years.


UC San Diego is particularly eager to attract alumni like Taner Halicioglu, who became rich helping Facebook get off the ground.

Halicioglu now teaches at the university and solved a problem that faculty say symbolizes the school’s spotty attention to the student experience.

For years, the computer science building drove people crazy. It wasn’t designed to get students and faculty to mingle.

Sergio Perea, 9, has his eyes screened by Eric Hernandez aboard the UCSD Shiley EyeMobile at the Robert Egger Sr. South Bay Recreation Center on August 6, 2019 in San Diego. (Sam Hodgson/The San Diego Union-Tribune)


The main lobby didn’t have a staircase that led to the basement, where the computer labs are located. Students used a staircase that began on the outside of the building, away from faculty offices.

Halicioglu solved the problem by spending millions to have workers bore a hole in the lobby floor and build the staircase everyone wanted and needed.

He also spent millions to support the work of lecturers, notably at a time when the computer science program was being overwhelmed by explosive growth.

“Those people should be paid very well because they’re the ones doing the vast majority of undergraduate teaching,” said Halicioglu, whose name is pronounced ha-li-(d)ji-O-loo.“These lecturers are the ‘first faces’ incoming undergrads see.”


He later made his biggest gift to date — $75 million to create a data science institute. The university struggled to explain how the gift would benefits students, consumers and industry. Halicioglu helped clear things up, inviting his friend Bill Nye “The Science Guy” to do a lot of the talking when the new program was dedicated at a public event.

Haliciogu’s concern about students is shared by Ken Kroner, a San Francisco investment manager who earned a doctorate in economics at the school.

“I know a lot of students who visited UCSD and chose not to go there,” Kroner said. “They said the reason was student experience ... We need to make it easier to live on campus.”

Khosla doesn’t think that UC San Diego has to become a carbon-copy of UCLA, one of the most popular schools in the country. But he says the university needs to more deeply connect with students emotionally, and leave them thankful for their college experience.


“I want you to cry when you come here because you’re leaving home,” Khosla said. “And I want you to cry when you graduate because, once again, you’ll be leaving home.”