Leland Stanford Junior University, or more commonly Stanford University, is a private research university in Stanford, California, and one of the world's most prestigious institutions, with the highest undergraduate selectivity and fundraising performance in the United States. Stanford was founded in 1885 by Leland Stanford 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 as a coeducational and non-denominational institution. Tuition was free until 1920.
Stanford is located in northern Silicon Valley near Palo Alto, California. The University's academic departments are organized into seven schools, and its 8,180-acre (3,310 ha) campus is one of the largest of its kind in the United States with several other holdings, such as laboratories and nature reserves, located outside the main campus. The University is the top fundraising institution in the country, becoming the first school to raise more than a billion dollars in a year.
Stanford's undergraduate program is the most selective in the country with an acceptance rate of 5.07% for the 2018 Class. 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.
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. Fifty-nine Nobel laureates have been affiliated with the University, and it is the Alma Mater of 30 living billionaires, and 17 astronauts. Stanford has produced a total of 18 Turing Award laureates, the highest in the world for any one institution. It is also one of the leading producers of members of the United States Congress.
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Trivia[]
- Stanford, Cornell University, and Yale University are the only American colleges that Degrassi alumni have attended.
- Stanford offered Jane a scholarship to attend.