UCSD General Campus
The University of California, San Diego was founded in 1960 along the Pacific coastline. Today, it educates about 20,000 students on a 1,200-acre campus. Although only four decades old, the University ranks tenth in the United States in the excellence of its graduate programs and the quality of its faculty, according to the latest, most highly-regarded ranking of universities, released in 1995 by the National Academy of Science's National Research Council. UCSD is the only institution founded in the 20th century to achieve a top ten rank. The popular press agrees with the National Academy: the 2000 U.S. News and World Report ranks UCSD seventh best in the excellence of all state-supported colleges and universities in the nation.
Of the current ~1000 members of the faculty, the University numbers five Nobel laureates and 66 members of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences — one of the highest faculty percentages of Academy members in the country. In a recent objective study of academic strengths among U.S. research universities conducted by Johns Hopkins' researchers, UCSD's faculty ranked tops in the nation among public institutions in science. When the private and public science rankings are merged, UCSD is fourth in the nation behind Caltech, Stanford, and MIT.
UCSD ranks sixth in the nation and first in the University of California system according to the amount of federal dollars the campus spends on research and development. In academic year 1999-2000, UCSD received $461.7 million in research funding. UCSD accounts for almost four times the national average of NIH grant dollars per capita. The National Science Foundation's most recent report ranked UCSD sixth in the nation in federal research funding (behind Johns Hopkins University, the University of Washington, Stanford, the University of Michigan, and the University of Pennsylvania), and first in the University of California system.
Laboratory space? Campus resources? UCSD, with an annual budget of $1.4 billion, has a multitude of campus resources. UCSD is home to one of the nation's two national supercomputing centers sponsored by the National Science Foundation, and leads a consortium of 46 universities in 19 states and 5 countries focused on developing computational technologies of the future. Library space at UCSD totals 403,627 assigned square feet and houses 2.6 million bound volumes. UCSD has spun off approximately 140 San Diego companies which create well over $1.8 billion in annual revenues. Forty percent of the people who work in the San Diego biotechnology/biomedical industry work for UCSD spinoff companies.
Recent surveys by U.S. News and World Report rank UCSD's Irwin and Joan Jacobs School of Engineering as 21st in the U.S. (9th among public universities). UCSD Neuroscience and UCSD/Scripps Institute of Oceanography have both ranked first in the country, and the Department of Bioengineering rated third in the nation. Yet UCSD is not just a science school: in surveys conducted by U.S. News and World Report of graduate and professional programs, UCSD ranked third in the nation in drama/theatre, twelfth in the nation in film programs, and tenth in the nation in politics.
