Summary

William L. Glascock, the principal of San Mateo High School, first proposed a junior college for San Mateo in the early 1920s as an alternative to the traditional four-year college. Tuition at the four-year institutions cost up to US$1,000 (equivalent to $15,000 in 2020) per year; at the junior college, students could instead live at home while earning credit equivalent to the freshman and sophomore years of a four-year school. The college was initially founded as the San Mateo Junior College (SMJC) after being approved by voters on March 31, 1922. The first classes started on August 22 of that year in a building shared with San Mateo High School. The first registered student was Marjorie Brace, who could not attend Stanford because of the high cost of tuition. She joined an initial class of 30 students, which would grow to 48 by the end of the academic year. The typical target for students graduating from the junior college was either Berkeley or Stanford; although the junior college was “in a valley between two mountains of conceit—Stanford and the University of California” as described by early faculty, the curriculum at San Mateo was designed to allow graduating students to continue studies at the larger four-year institutions.

The school colors of blue and white were chosen, according to anecdotes from early graduates, either from the colors of those two targets (white from Stanford, blue from Berkeley), or because those were the leftover ribbon colors from a student tasked with decorating a dance. The origins of the bulldog mascot are similarly murky: either all other animals had already been chosen by other colleges, or a local kennel which specialized in raising English bulldogs offered to have one of their animals, Rival Goldstone, appear at sporting events.