Stanford CA 94305, Top 100 Universities in USA 2014 – Rank – 2,   Stanford University in Stanford County

Stanford University

450 Serra Mall, Stanford, CA 94305, United States

Foundation and vision 

The university was founded in 1885 by Leland Stanford, former governor of and U.S. senator from California and leading railroad tycoon, and his wife, Jane Lathrop Stanford, in memory of their only child, Leland Stanford, Jr., who died of typhoid fever two months before his 16th birthday in 1884. Stanford was opened on October 1, 1891^[2][3] as a coeducational and non-denominationalinstitution. Tuition was free until the 1930s.^[15] The university struggled financially after Leland Stanford’s 1893 death and after much of the campus was damaged by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.^[16] Following World War II, Provost Frederick Terman supported faculty and graduates’ entrepreneurialism to build self-sufficient local industry in what would become known as Silicon Valley. By 1970, Stanford was home to a linear accelerator, and was one of the original four ARPANET nodes (precursor to the Internet).^[17]

The University is located in northern Silicon Valley near Palo Alto. Its 8,180-acre (3,310 ha)^[18] campus is one of the largest college campuses in the United States.^[8] Several other holdings, such as laboratories and nature reserves, are located outside the main campus.^[7][18] Its academic departments are organized into seven Schools with a student body of approximately 7,000 undergraduates and 8,900 graduates. Stanford has been the top fundraising university in the United States for several years, being the first school to raise more than a billion dollars in a year in 2012.^[19]

Stanford students compete in 36 varsity sports, and the University is one of two private institutions in the Division I FBS Pacific-12 Conference. It has gained 105 NCAA championships, the second-most for a university, and has won the NACDA Directors’ Cup every year since 1994-1995.^[20]

Stanford faculty and alumni have founded many companies including Google, Hewlett-Packard, Nike, Sun Microsystems, and Yahoo!, and companies founded by Stanford alumni generate more than $2.7 trillion in annual revenue, equivalent to the 10th-largest economy in the world.^[21] Fifty-eight Nobel laureates have been affiliated with the university,^[22] and it is the alma mater of 30 living billionaires, 17 astronauts, and 18 Turing Award laureates. It is also one of the leading producers of members of the United States Congress

Recent history

Since 2000, Stanford has expanded dramatically. In February 2012, Stanford announced the conclusion of the Stanford Challenge. In a period of five years, Stanford raised $6.2 billion, exceeding its initial goal by $2 billion, making it the most successful university fundraising campaign in history.^[69] The funds will go towards 103 new endowed faculty appointments, 360 graduate student research fellowships, scholarships and financial aid, and the construction or renovation of 38 campus buildings. It enabled the construction of the world’s largest facility dedicated exclusively to stem cell research, an entirely new campus for the business school, added dramatically to the law school, a brand-new engineering quad, created a new art and art history building, an on-campus concert hall, a new art museum, and a planned expansion of the medical school, among others.^[70] In 2012, Stanford opened the Stanford Center at Peking University, a just-under 400,000-square-foot (37,000 m²), three-story research center in the Peking University campus. The ceremony featured remarks by U.S. Ambassador to China Gary Locke and Stanford President John Hennessy. Stanford became the first American university to have its own building on a major Chinese university campus