University of California, San Diego - UCSD

Founded in 1960 as an offshoot of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UCSD now has more than 22,000 students and nearly 1,500 faculty members. The university includes several residential colleges, each with its own campus, residential halls, and offices. These include Roger Revelle College, which was founded as the first college at UCSD in 1964; John Muir College, which has more of a general-education requirements approach; Thurgood Marshall College (1970), which focuses on a liberal arts education with a role in social responsibility; Earl Warren College (1974), which requires two programs of concentration in disciplines unrelated to each other in addition to a major program; Eleanor Roosevelt College (1988), which focuses its core education program on cross-cultural interdisciplinary courses; and Sixth College (2002), which, as its mission statement says: focuses on "historical and philosophical connections among culture, art and technology.”

In 2006, US News and World Report ranked UCSD as the seventh best school in the country for public university undergraduate programs. For the 2006-2007 school year, UCSD received over 43,000 freshmen applications of which nearly 20,000 students were accepted for fall admission, making the admission rate 45%.  In 2007, US News and World Report ranked the Graduate School of Medicine 14th in the nation for medical research and 33rd for primary care. The Jacobs School of Engineering was ranked 11th in the nation, tied with Cornell, and its biomedical engineering program was ranked second behind Johns Hopkins.

As part of a commitment to serving the San Diego area, in 1999 UCSD opened the Preuss School, a charter college preparatory school for low-income students from the area, giving local teens a chance at a college education they would not normally have had. The university also offers community extension courses for the general community as part of the UCSD Extension program. More directly, over 200 San Diego companies have been founded by UCSD faculty and alumni, and over 40% of the people employed in the San Diego biotechnology industry work in UCSD spin-offs. Sixteen UCSD faculty members have won the Nobel Prize, nine of whom are currently on the faculty. UCSD faculty also include nine MacArthur Fellows and 146 Guggenheim Fellows.

UCSD participates in athletics such as swimming, water polo, soccer, volleyball, crew, track and field, and tennis. In addition to these NCAA Division II teams, the school fields a number of club sports teams. The UCSD surfing team has won the national title six times.

Given the attractive environment for educators, administrators, and students alike, UCSD will continue to lead in education in California and the US, and will provide a world-class research environment in technology, the arts, and sciences for many years to come.