The University of California, San Diego (popularly known as UC San Diego or UCSD) is a public research university in San Diego, California. The campus contains 694 buildings and is located in the La Jolla community. UC San Diego is one of ten University of California campuses and was founded in 1955 around the pre-existing Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

22,048 undergradute and 5,073 graduate students enrolled in Fall 2007 and the university awarded 6,802 degrees in 2005/06. The university is organized into six undergraduate colleges and six graduate divisions and offers 125 undergraduate majors, 52 masters degrees, 51 doctoral programs, and four professional degrees. The four year, full-time undergraduate program is classified as "more selective, higher transfer-in" by the Carnegie Foundation and was ranked 35th and "most selective" among national universities by U.S. News & World Report and 7th in the nation among public schools by the same publication. The university was ranked 14th internationally in the Academic Ranking of World Universities.

The university employs 7,566 faculty members including eight Nobel Laureates, eight MacArthur fellows, three National Medal of Science laureates, and two Fields medallists. UCSD has a very high level of research activity and total research funding for 2006/07 was $714 million. The university operates the UC San Diego Medical Center and is affiliated with several regional research centers, such as the Salk Institute, the Burnham Institute for Medical Research, and The Scripps Research Institute. The university was admitted to the Association of American Universities in 1982.

UC San Diego's 19 intercollegiate sports teams are known as the Tritons and participate in the NCAA's Division II (DII) level in the California Collegiate Athletic Association.

History

When the Regents originally authorized the San Diego campus in 1956, it was planned to start as a graduate school of science and engineering comparable in quality to Caltech. Citizens of San Diego enthusiastically supported the idea, voting the same year to transfer to the university fifty-nine acres of mesa land on the coast near the Scripps Institute. General Dynamics Corporation donated a large sum of money to be used for recruiting a distinguished founding faculty.

In 1957, an undergraduate curriculum was planned as part of the general science curriculum, and Roger Revelle, Director of Scripps, was named dean of the new school. UC San Diego was the first general campus of the UC to be designed "from the top down" in terms of curricular and research emphasis. Stellar faculty were recruited as they became available as opposed to the dictates of a pre-planned curriculum or academic schedule. The graduate division of the school opened in 1960, when it had 20 faculty in residence, with instruction offered in the fields of physics, biology, chemistry and earth science. Classes initially met in the Scripps Institute.