page_title: Stanford University
section_title: Reputation and rankings
hierarchical_section_title: Stanford University / Academics / Reputation and rankings
caption_attribution_description: West gate of the Stanford University Main Quad.
context_page_description: Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. Stanford is ranked among the top five universities in the world in major education publications.
  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 U.S. Senator and former Governor of California who 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 the death of Leland Stanford 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.
context_section_description: Notably, Stanford ranks high and often first in many domestic college ranking measures, leading Slate to dub Stanford in 2014 as "the Harvard of the 21st century," and The New York Times in the same year to conclude that "Stanford University has become America's 'it' school, by measures that Harvard once dominated." From polls done by The Princeton Review in 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019, the most commonly named "dream college" for students was Stanford; separately, parents, too, most frequently named Stanford their "dream college." The inaugural 2017 Wall Street Journal/Times Higher Education College Rankings picked Stanford as the No. 1 school in the United States.
  Globally, the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) ranked Stanford second in the world most years from 2003 to 2016. In 2019, it ranked 4th among the universities around the world by SCImago Institutions Rankings. Additionally, Times Higher Education recognized Stanford as one of the world's "six super brands" on its World Reputation Rankings, along with Berkeley, Cambridge, Harvard, MIT, and Oxford. Stanford was ranked fifth in the 2016, 2017, and 2018 Nature Index Annual Tables, which measure the largest contributors to papers published in 82 leading journals.
caption: Gate to the Main Quad
exif: {"Image ImageWidth": "2800", "Image ImageLength": "4200", "Image BitsPerSample": "[16, 16, 16]", "Image Compression": "Uncompressed", "Image PhotometricInterpretation": "2", "Image Make": "Canon", "Image Model": "Canon EOS 5D", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image SamplesPerPixel": "3", "Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image PlanarConfiguration": "1", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS5.1 Windows", "Image DateTime": "2012:11:18 02:12:18", "Image ExifOffset": "300", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "910", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "9064", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/200", "EXIF FNumber": "9", "EXIF ExposureProgram": "Program Normal", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "100", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0230", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2011:05:07 07:31:53", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2011:05:07 07:31:53", "EXIF ShutterSpeedValue": "477741/62500", "EXIF ApertureValue": "126797/20000", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "-1/3", "EXIF MaxApertureValue": "37/8", "EXIF MeteringMode": "Pattern", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire, compulsory flash mode", "EXIF FocalLength": "80", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "2800", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "4200", "EXIF FocalPlaneXResolution": "873600/283", "EXIF FocalPlaneYResolution": "1456000/471", "EXIF FocalPlaneResolutionUnit": "2", "EXIF CustomRendered": "Normal", "EXIF ExposureMode": "Auto Exposure", "EXIF WhiteBalance": "Auto", "EXIF SceneCaptureType": "Standard", "EXIF BodySerialNumber": "1020711325", "EXIF LensSpecification": "[28, 135, 0/0, 0/0]", "EXIF LensModel": "EF28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM"}