ASU at a Glance

ASU History ASU Mission A New American University

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General

  • ASU’s Tempe campus has one of the nation’s largest enrollments on a single campus at more than 52,000 students. ASU has a total of more than 67,000 at the four ASU campuses.
  • U.S. News and World Report ranked ASU in the top tier of national universities in the country in 2008 – after being in the 3rd tier for years. Three ASU colleges have made the elite top 25 U.S. graduate programs list. ASU is the only Arizona university with any colleges in the top 25.
  • The Barrett Honors College was chosen "Best of America" by the editors of Reader's Digest in 2005 for its strong undergraduate program. The magazine says Barrett offers "an Ivy League-style education minus the sticker shock." Barrett students have an average SAT of 1322.
  • Almost 2,500 ASU freshmen are from the top 10 percent of their high school class, more than Harvard, Yale or Princeton.
  • ASU is ranked as one of the top 100 universities in the world by the Institute of Higher Education, Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
  • Economics professor Ed Prescott is the university's first Nobel laureate, earning the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2004.
  • Twenty-one ASU faculty members have membership in the prestigious National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences. Since 2002, ASU has increased its number of National Academy members by more than 400 percent.  ASU has also increased the number of members of other honorary societies like the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Fellows of the Royal Society of London

Academics

  • ASU’s 2007 freshman class included 148 National Merit Scholars, more than any public university in the Pac-10 conference.
  • Eleven ASU students have been named among the top 20 undergraduates in the U.S. by USA Today, on the All-USA College Academic First Team, since 1992. This is the best record of any public university in the nation. Only Harvard, Yale and Duke have had more. (Another 7 ASU students were named to the second team of 20 and 2 to the third team of 20.) A national team of judges chooses top students based on grades, leadership, activities and how the students extend their intellectual talents beyond the classroom.
  • Three ASU students have won Rhodes Scholarships and 13 have been awarded Marshall Scholarships since 1994. (ASU has won a total 5 Rhodes over the years—there were 2 Rhodes in the 60s.) These two awards are considered the most distinguished scholarships in the world, given to only 30 or 40 students a year after many rounds of interviews, based on overall potential and evaluated on intelligence, character, integrity and leadership. Both provide for two years of postgraduate study in Great Britain. Few universities have won more Marshalls.
  • The Truman Scholarship is the nation’s highest undergraduate leadership award. ASU has been named a Truman Honor Institution, for having 15 winners since 1991. The $30,000 scholarship is given to juniors who have outstanding leadership potential and who intend to pursue careers in public service.
  • ASU is a leading university for Udall Scholarships, awarded to top sophomores and juniors each year who are headed for careers in environmental public policy, tribal policy and health care. Twenty students have won 22 Udalls since the award was established in 1995.
  • ASU students’ record of winning Fulbright Fellowships is double the national average. Ten percent of applicants nominated from any given university actually will be awarded a Fulbright, but ASU applicants win at the rate of 36 percent. In 2007, 16 students won Fulbrights to study or do research abroad next year, a record for ASU, placing the university 4th among public universities and 14th overall. In 2008, 14 won Fulbrights.
  • In the past 13 years, 33 ASU students earned Goldwater Scholarships, the premier undergraduate award for science, math and engineering scholars.
  • Seventeen students since 1995 have won Udall Scholarships for pursuing careers in environmental policy, tribal policy and health care.
  • For the past 4 years, ASU has led the nation in NSEP Scholarships. ASU students won 56 National Security Education Program grants to study overseas in the past 5 years.
  • Almost 2,500 ASU freshmen are from the top 10 percent of their high school class, more than Harvard, Yale or Princeton.
  • For the past eight years ASU has ranked in the top 20 universities in the country for the number of freshman National Merit Scholars, along with Harvard, Stanford, Yale, UC Berkeley, MIT and Princeton. ASU ranks 6th in public schools. In 2007-08, ASU enrolled 148 freshman National Merit Scholars and 583 overall.
  • ASU enrolls 297 National Hispanic Scholars.
  • ASU awards 13,600 degrees annually, on pace with the nation’s largest universities.

Colleges/Schools

  • ASU’s Barrett Honors College freshmen have an average SAT score of 1322 and include 150 National Merit Scholars.
  • ASU’s Barrett Honors College was named “Best of America” by the editors of Reader’s Digest in 2005.
  • The W. P. Carey School of Business is in the top 10 nationally for number of faculty with doctoral degrees.
  • The W. P. Carey School of Business is in the top 10 percent nationally for quality of faculty research.
  • The W. P. Carey School of Business has five departments in the top 20 rankings of U.S. News and World Report: supply chain management (No. 3), information systems (No. 15), accounting (No. 16), marketing (No. 18), management (No. 19).
  • The W. P. Carey School of Business is one of the nation’s largest business schools, with 160 tenured and tenure-track faculty.
  • The W. P. Carey School of Business has more than 1,000 graduate and 2,600 upper-division undergraduate students, plus more than 59,000 alumni.
  • The Financial Times ranks the W. P. Carey School of Business No. 21 in the world for doctoral programs and No. 33 for custom education programs for executives.  

Outreach

  • ASU currently has 470 community outreach programs in 532 locations and offered by 168 different units, totaling 1,112 outreach opportunities.
  • Eight/KAET-TV, ASU’s PBS affiliate, reaches about 1.7 million viewers each week.
  • Eight/KAET-TV consistently ranks among the most viewed public television stations per capita in the country.
  • Eight/KAET-TV is writing Arizona’s history on television through the Arizona Collection, a series of programs celebrating the people, places and history of our state.
  • ASU has more than 400 community outreach programs in 500 locations throughout the state.  
  • All of ASU’s campuses provide community outreach activities and programs, with 155 participating academic and administrative units.
  • The ASU in the Community website (www.asu.edu/community) offers the most comprehensive list of ASU community outreach programs.  
  • ASU Student Athletes ( 370 or 70 percent of  ASU student-athletes) performed almost 1,700 hours of community service,  engaging over 61,000 youth and adults in the community.
  • ASU’s community outreach in Arizona spans from Chinle in the north to Nogales in the south, and from Lake Havasu City in the west to Eagar in the east.

Research and Economic Development

  • ASU is “academically, a rising star in the world of research,” says Princeton Review’s 2006 edition of “The Best 361 Colleges.”
  • ASU’s research expenditures grew to $218.5 million in the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2007—an increase of more than 300 percent since ASU became a Research 1 university in 1994
  • The construction and acquisition of state-of-the-art research buildings has grown rapidly over the past three years with more than 1 million square feet of new research space.
  • With the “Welcome to Mars” exhibit in 2005, ASU became the first non-Chinese institution to participate in China’s Science and Technology Week, the largest science outreach activity in the world. The exhibit visited India in 2007.
  • Mars expert Phil Christensen, an ASU geological sciences professor, is the only scientist to have designed four remote sensing instruments to send data back to Earth simultaneously from another planet.
  • ASU’s “Decision Center for a Desert City” is the largest grant ever issued by the National Science Foundation’s Social, Behavioral and Economic Science Directorate.
  • ASU runs one of the National Science Foundation’s two urban Long Term Ecological Research Centers, studying the interaction between metropolitan Phoenix and the underlying ecosystem.
  • ASU was awarded $43.6 million by the Army to lead the country’s primary industry-government-academic consortium developing a new generation of flexible display technology.
  • ASU Technopolis, an outreach of ASU’s technology transfer program, has provided education, coaching, mentoring and connecting to more than 300 entrepreneurs.
  • ASU is at the forefront of American universities supporting student entrepreneurs, investing $200,000 each year in seed funding through the Edson Student Entrepreneur Initiative.
  • The Edson Student Entrepreneur Initiative at ASU is one of the most comprehensive university programs of its kind.  
  • ASU’s Center for Research on Education in Science, Mathematics, Engineering and Technology (CRESMET) is Arizona’s premier source of research for improving student performance in math and science.  
  • More scientists, mathematicians and engineers work on education research through ASU’s CRESMET than in almost any other university.
  • Some 50,000 Arizona high school students will have ASU’s CRESMET to thank for training their teachers in research-sound methods of teaching math and science.
  • The Biodesign Institute at ASU has become the Phoenix metropolitan region’s largest generator of federal biomedical research funding.
  • ASU is the only state university in Arizona researching team performance relating to unmanned aerial vehicles, and aviation training and vision perception relating to flight.  
  • ASU’s College of Technology and Applied Sciences is the only higher education institution in the state to offer a fully operational semiconductor fabrication laboratory.
  • ASU’s Polytechnic campus has one of the only three testing labs for solar panels in the world.  

Alumni

  • Seventy-five percent of ASU’s alumni worldwide are under the age of 45.
  • Seventy-nine percent of ASU’s alumni in Arizona are under the age of 45.
  • There are almost 260,000 living ASU alumni worldwide.
  • More than 162,000 ASU alumni live in Arizona.

Athletics

  • ASU ranks No. 2 in the Pac-10  Conference (Stanford No. 1) and is ranked in the top 10 in Division I Athletics  for highest number of academic All-Americans over the past 6 years.
  • ASU ranks No. 2 in the Pac-10  Conference (Stanford No. 1) for most Academic All-Pac-10 selections for 2006-07  for all sports.
  • ASU football is No. 3 in the  Pac-10 Conference (behind Stanford and Cal) for number of Pac-10 Conference all-academic team members  over the past 6 years.
  • In 2006-07, ASU Football  was  No. 2 in the Pac-10 Conference for graduation rate (behind only Stanford)  at 67 percent.
  • Eight ASU football  student-athletes played this season as college graduates. This ranks as the fifth highest in the nation.  Sixteen of the 26 seniors in the current class have already graduated. Nine of the remaining 10 will graduate in spring 2008 or summer.
  • ASU led the nation in 2007-8 with 19 players who played in a postseason bowl game who had already earned their college degree.
  • In the fall of 2003, ASU became the first football program in the history of college athletics to honor academic achievement (3.0 or above) with a patch on the football jersey. ASU football continues to wear the Scholar Baller patch and this year, additionally, Softball, Wrestling, and Women's Basketball wear this patch on uniforms or warm-ups acknowledging academic prowess.
  • ASU is the only university to fund a character education program for its football student-athletes.
  • ASU’s athletic department finished the 2004-2005 season No. 11 in the U.S. Sports Academy Directors’ Cup standings for overall sports excellence.
  • By the end of the 2004-2005 year, 18 of 22 sports at ASU participated in postseason competition.
  • ASU had 18 Pac-10 individual champions and seven Pac-10 conference players of the year in 2004-2005.
  • The 2004-2005 team GPA for the women’s soccer team was No. 17 in the nation among all Division I soccer programs.
  • ASU men’s basketball has had at least one player on the Pac-10 All-Academic team each of the past five seasons.
  • ASU’s men’s golf team has posted nine NCAA top-10 finishes in Randy Lein’s 13 years as head coach, tied for the best mark in the nation.
  • For the past four years, ASU has been in the top seven in the country and No. 1 in the Pac-10 for most Academic All-Americans.
  • For the 2006-2007 academic year, more than 138 ASU student-athletes were named to the conference All-Academic Team - ( approximately 25 percent of all ASU student-athletes were honored).
  • Twelve ASU student athletes earned academic All-American honors in 2004–2005.