Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly known as Stanford University or simply Stanford, is a private research university located in Stanford, California, United States.

Stanford was founded in 1885 by the former Governor of California and future U.S. Senator Leland Stanford and his wife, Jane Lathrop Stanford, as a memorial to their only son, Leland Stanford Jr., who died of typhoid in Europe a few weeks before his 16th birthday. The Stanfords used their farm lands to create the university, and hoped to establish a major research university in the West, the first of its kind. In addition, the university was established as a co-educational institution, enrolling both male and female students.

Stanford University enrolls about 6,700 undergraduates from all over the United States and the world, as well as about 8,000 graduate students. There are approximately over 160,000 living Stanford alumni, both undergraduate and graduate. There are also 18 Nobel Prize laureates affiliated with Stanford. The University, because of its close location to Silicon Valley, offers strong programs in business management and engineering; many Stanford alumni have founded companies associated with technology, such as HP, Sun Microsystems and Google. It is also known as a highly selective school, with competitive admissions cycles. It is currently ranked 4th among national universities by U.S. News and World Report.

History

Stanford was founded by railroad magnate and California Governor Leland Stanford and his wife, Jane Stanford. It is named in honor of their only child, Leland Stanford, Jr., who died of typhoid just before his 16th birthday. They decided to dedicate a university to their only son, and Leland Stanford told his wife, "The children of California shall be our children."

The story that a lady in "faded gingham" and a man in a "homespun threadbare suit" went to visit the president of Harvard about making a donation, were rebuffed, and then founded Stanford is untrue.

Locals and members of the university community are known to refer to the school as The Farm, a nod to the fact that the university is located on the former site of Leland Stanford's horse farm.

The University's founding grant was written on November 11, 1885, and accepted by the first Board of Trustees on November 14. The cornerstone was laid on May 14, 1887, and the University officially opened on October 1, 1891, to 559 students and 15 faculty members, seven of whom hailed from Cornell UniversityCornell/Stanford Connection. At the opening of the school, there was no tuition for students, a program which lasted into the 1930s 1. Among the first class of students was a young future president Herbert Hoover, who would claim to be first student ever at Stanford, by virtue of having been the first person in the first class to sleep in the dormitory.