#2 Stanford University

Stanford University (Stanford; officially Leland Stanford Junior University, colloquially the Farm) is a private research university in Stanford, California, adjacent to Palo Alto and between San Jose and San Francisco. Stanford’s undergraduate program is the most selective in America. Due to its academic strength, wealth, and proximity to Silicon Valley it is often cited as one of the world’s most prestigious universities.

The university was founded in 1885 by Leland and Jane Stanford in memory of their only child, Leland Stanford Jr., who had died of typhoid fever at age 15 the previous year. Stanford was a former Governor of California and U.S. Senator; he made his fortune as a railroad tycoon. The school admitted its first students on October 1, 1891, as a coeducational and non-denominational institution.

Stanford University struggled financially after Leland Stanford’s death in 1893 and again after much of the campus was damaged by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Following World War II, Provost Frederick Terman supported faculty and graduates’ entrepreneurialism to build self-sufficient local industry in what would later be known as Silicon Valley. The university is also one of the top fundraising institutions in the country, becoming the first school to raise more than a billion dollars in a year.

There are three academic schools that have both undergraduate and graduate students and another four professional schools. Students compete in 36 varsity sports, and the university is one of two private institutions in the Division I FBSPac-12 Conference. It has gained 113 NCAA team championships, the most for a university (tied with UCLA), 483 individual championships, the most in Division I, and has won the NACDA Directors’ Cup, recognizing the university with the best overall athletic team achievement, for 22 consecutive years, beginning in 1994–1995.