[wburg]

Higher education on the west coast is pretty new all around: universities like Stanford and USC are among the oldest but are only about 120 years old, prior to that the wealthy sent their kids east to go to school. Sacramento was a pretty small place until the post-WWII period, both geographically and in population, and primarily an industrial town (packing vegetables, building locomotives, and putting vegetables onto trains) so there wasn't a great need. I'd imagine that proximity to colleges in Davis (originally set up as an agronomy school with funding from Southern Pacific) and Berkeley also reduced earlier need for a four-year college.

And yeah, Sac City looks better, at least in spots: they built better-looking buildings in the twenties and thirties than the fifties and sixties.