College Park

Orange Coast College sets the scale of College Park. The campus covers 177 acres on the city's record at 2701 Fairview Road, and the General Plan credits it with more than 80 academic program areas and more than 50 career and technical programs. The General Plan also places the neighborhood's higher density housing in a cluster around the college, which is a pattern worth knowing before comparing two streets that look alike on a map.

College Park Elementary sits at 2380 Notre Dame Road on a site of 7.9 acres and enrolled 473 students on the 2024-25 federal count. It is one of 20 Newport-Mesa Unified campuses that count places inside Costa Mesa, together enrolling 9,235 students, and the district sets the assigned campus by address. The city's park system around the neighborhood runs to 41 named park and open space polygons, the largest Fairview Park at 219 acres and the largest developed neighborhood park TeWinkle Memorial at 43 acres.

This ground was an army base before it was a neighborhood. The Santa Ana Army Air Base grew to 1,337 acres between Newport Boulevard and Harbor Boulevard during the Second World War, and thousands of men passed through it. It closed in 1945. In 1946 the War Assets Administration sold a piece of the base to the Orange Coast Junior College District, and Orange Coast College opened its doors in 1948. Southern California Bible College, now Vanguard University, opened nearby in 1950.

The houses came in the late 1950s on the land between and around the two campuses, and the developer named the streets for universities. Cornell, Rutgers, Villanova, Wake Forest, Notre Dame and Fordham all run through the neighborhood, which is where the name College Park comes from. A second naming scheme sits alongside it: Merrimac Way and Monitor Way carry the names of the two ironclads that fought each other in 1862, and Arlington Drive points at the national cemetery.