Stanford, CA 94305, Top 10 Computer Science USA, Rank – 3, Stanford University 

Stanford University 

450 Serra Mall Stanford, CA 94305

Leland Stanford Junior University, or more commonly Stanford University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. It is one of the most prestigious universities in the world.^{[10][11][12][13][14]}

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 at age 15 the previous year. Stanford was opened on October 1, 1891^[2][3] as a coeducational and non-denominational institution. 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.

Reputation and rankings

Stanford occupies the number one spot in numerous domestic college ranking measures, leading Slate to dub Stanford “the Harvard of the 21st century,”^[144] and The New York Times to conclude that “Stanford University has become America’s ‘it’ school”.^[145] From polls done by The Princeton Review in 2010, 2013 and 2014, Stanford is the most commonly named “dream college” for both students and parents (and in 2011 for students),^[146][147]while a 2003 Gallup poll found that Stanford is the second-most prestigious university in the eyes of the general public.^{[148][needs update]}The Times Higher Education World Reputation Rankings placed it third in 2014.^[149] In the 2012 U.S. News Best Graduate Schools rankings, Stanford was also placed in the top 5 for every discipline in which it was ranked.