In an unexpected move, Cal State San Marcos says it will expand deep into South County to offer five bachelor's degree programs in a large, fast-growing "education desert" that has been begging for such help for decades.

CSUSM faculty will teach the programs at Southwestern College in Chula Vista, a 2-year community college that is been largely confined to offering associate degree and certificates.

Southwestern is the only public institution of higher education in South County, which is home to 600,000 people. The region does not have a private university that broadly offers in-person bachelor's degree courses locally.

Chula Vista officials have tried for 30 years to attract a major university, going so far as to set aside land where one or more could be built. The effort has yielded little, leading the city to court universities willing to teach select bachelor's programs at Southwestern.

UC San Diego and San Diego State University -- which are much older, bigger and closer to Chula Vista than CSUSM -- have expressed interest.

UCSD has indicated it will introduce a bachelor's program in public health at Southwestern next year. SDSU is negotiating with Southwestern to jointly offer a bachelor's degree in nursing that would be taught at a city library. That also could start as early as next year.

CSUSS has shot past those schools by deciding to offer five bachelor's programs that will be taught at Southwestern, 41 miles to the south.

The university will introduce bachelor's programs in business administration, computer information systems and cybersecurity in fall 2026, and human development and bilingual speech language pathology in fall 2027. Other disciplines could be added.

Participants will be Southwestern students in their freshmen and sophomore years, who would then become CSUSM students in their junior year.

"We're meeting students where they are, helping make sure that they have an opportunity to earn a bachelor's degree," said Ellen Neufeldt, president of CSUSM. "It is the right thing to do and will move that region forward."

She quietly negotiated the agreement with Mark Sanchez, Southwestern's president.

"The bachelor's programs they are offering are for in-demand occupations," he said. "People will be able to earn them here, right in their back yard."

Those occupations range from supply-chain experts who work with products moving back and forth across the U.S.-Mexico border, to IT technicians serving the region's three biggest employment sectors -- government, health and schools -- and accounts managers for the tourist and hospitality companies that are expected to pop up next to the newly-opened, $1.3 billion Gaylord Hotel and Convention Center in Chula Vista.

There's also a need for construction managers in the Otay Ranch neighborhood, where another 12,000 units of housing will be built in an area with roughly the same footprint as San Francisco.

The new agreement comes at a moment when both schools are thriving despite the many troubles that currently afflict the nation's colleges and universities.

Neufeldt has pushed Cal State San Marcos enrollment to a record 17,000, a figure forecast to grow by about 6,000 over the next 15 years. She recently obtained enough money to build a $110 million science and engineering center that will enable the school to serve 2,000 engineering majors, instead of the 300 it has now.

She's giving the school a residential feel by adding lots of student housing on and near campus. And Neufeldt is looking for ways to train workers for Scripps Health, which will build a $1.2 billion medical complex near campus.

Sanchez raised Southwestern's fall enrollment to a record 20,093 and has presided over construction of new classroom buildings, a planetarium, and a soon-to-open student union that will provide classrooms for universities offering bachelor's degree courses.

Southwestern also hustled to become a main provider of culinary workers at the Gaylord project.

Both presidents are also looking south of the border, to the Tijuana area.

Southwestern recently agreed offer a culinary science degree course at the Autonomous University of Baja California for the next three years. Neufeldt hasn't committed to something similar. But she told the Union-Tribune, "we do talk about that" idea.