- FAU is serving a record-high student body of 29,000 undergraduate and graduate students at sites throughout its six-county service region in southeast Florida. More than 170 degree programs are available to them through 10 colleges.
- FAU is rapidly becoming a university of first-choice for students, as evidenced by the fact that the Admissions Office received more than 24,600 applications for the Fall 2011 freshman class — almost double the previous year’s number.
- In Fall 2011, FAU welcomed its largest-ever freshman class — 3,351 students — including 110 exceptionally high-achieving high school graduates who entered the Harriet L. Wilkes Honors College.
- With 46 percent of its student body classified as minority or international students, FAU ranks as the most racially, ethnically and culturally diverse institution in Florida’s State University System.
- FAU students come from all 50 states and more than 180 countries. The University encourages U.S.-born students to take advantage of study-abroad opportunities, and many of them do so.
- With more than 3,200 employees, including a world-class faculty of 1,100, FAU has a regional economic impact of $6.7 billion annually.
- The newly created Charles E. Schmidt College of Medicine has received preliminary accreditation and welcomed its first class of future physicians in Fall 2011. When this program reaches its full enrollment of 256 students in 2014, its annual economic impact is expected to be $52 million.
- A 30,000-seat football stadium opened on the Boca Raton campus in October 2011. The Florida Department of Tourism estimates game day local economic impact at $1.7 million.
- The stadium is part of the Innovation Village project, which includes a new apartment complex that offers the best in campus living to more than 1,200 students. It opened in Fall 2011, increasing FAU’s resident student population to 4,000. Student housing is offered on the Boca Raton and Jupiter campuses.
- For three years in a row, The Princeton Review has ranked FAU’s College of Business as one of the best business schools in the U.S.
- The School of Accounting consistently ranks in the top 10 nationally for its graduates’ very high passing rate on the National CPA exam. In 2009 Jeremy Hurwitch, an FAU accounting alumnus, scored among the top 10 of the 85,000 people who took the exam.
- FAU is taking its place among the world’s great research centers and has been given the designation of a “High Research Activity” university by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. FAU faculty members won funding grants totaling more than $43.2 million in 2010-11.
- The field of ocean engineering was pioneered at FAU, which established the country’s first such academic program in 1965. Now augmented by the highly advanced SeaTech research center in Dania Beach, it remains one of the best programs of its kind internationally.
- FAU is the home of the Southeast National Marine Renewable Energy Center, a federally funded research facility that is developing technology to generate energy by harnessing the power of Florida’s ocean currents.
- FAU is the only university in the country that has its own recording label, Hoot/Wisdom, which introduces students to the world of commercial music by allowing them to produce and release their own CDs.
- FAU’s distinguished arts and humanities faculty have won many high honors, including a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship awarded in 2010 to Professor Blane de St. Croix, a member of the Visual Arts and Art History Department.
- FAU's student-athletes have garnered success in class and in sport, securing more than 20 conference championships while competing in 18 NCAA Division I sports. In 2007, FAU's football program became the youngest in NCAA history to reach and win a bowl game, and the following year the Owls made the record books again by achieving a second bowl victory. FAU takes special pride in the fact that 156 of its student-athletes made the Sun Belt Conference’s 2010 Academic Honor Roll by earning cumulative grade point averages of 3.0 or higher.
- FAU’s Lifelong Learning Society is one of the largest and most successful programs of its kind in America, with 20,000 members enrolled on the Boca Raton and Jupiter campuses. The Lifelong Learning Society offers people of retirement age the opportunity to take non-credit courses in a wide variety of fields, ranging from contemporary politics to the arts.
Updated May 2012
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