The vision that inspired the founders of UC San Diego in the 1950s was a fascinating one: Building on the worldwide fame of Scripps Institution of Oceanography, they would attract the leading scholars of the day; and those scholars—scientists and artists—would, in their turn, conduct top-notch research and teach courses that would attract many of the best students from all over the state, the nation, and abroad. As this Annual Financial Report indicates, that dream is still very much alive and well on the UC San Diego campus.
The most recent edition of America’s Best Colleges published by U.S. News and World Report ranked UC San Diego as the sixth best public university in the nation after UC Berkeley, the University of Virginia, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, UCLA, and the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor.
Within forty years, UC San Diego has come to be recognized by the international community as a university where outstanding faculty conduct world-class research leading to mind-shattering discoveries and innovative technology.
The United States has such confidence in our work, that UC San Diego, for the second year in a row, is third in the nation, and ahead of all other University of California campuses, in terms of federal agency expenditures on research and development. In terms of total research and development expenditures, UC San Diego is now sixth in the nation.
Our student enrollment has doubled over the past ten years; and their GPA and SAT scores have been rising steadily, always ranking second or third in the UC system alongside UC Berkeley and UCLA. Student drop-out rates are just 7 percent—less than a third of the national average. Moreover, as the region’s thriving biotech, telecommunications, and computer software industries so forcefully demonstrate, UC San Diego has been making extraordinary contributions to the economy of not just San Diego, but to the state of California, and the nation as a whole.
Our success, we believe, is a result of our fidelity to the original vision that inspired the late Roger Revelle and others. That vision ensured excellence in faculty appointments, research, teaching, and public service.
As we look forward to a future that will surely provide countless opportunities for us to replicate and extend that excellence in circumstances that none of us can even dream of today, we will continue to rely on that vision and renew our commitment to it.
