Education and
Cultural Institutions
Higher Education
California is noted for its many
excellent public colleges and universities. The University of California, one of
the larger universities in the world, has campuses at Berkeley, Irvine, Santa
Cruz, Los Angeles, Davis, Santa
Barbara, San Diego, and Riverside. The system also includes a campus focusing on
health sciences programs in San Francisco, the Scripps Institution of
Oceanography at La Jolla, and more than 100 research facilities throughout the
state. It was founded in 1855 as the private College of California, at Oakland,
and was chartered as a state university, at Berkeley, in 1868. In the late 1990s
the state system of higher education included, besides the University of
California, the California State University System, which has 20 campuses
stretching from San Diego to Humboldt County along the northwest coast and 107
community colleges. In all the state had 140 public and 243 private institutions
of higher education.
Many of the
early colleges in California were private institutions established by religious
denominations. The two oldest schools in the state, both dating from 1851, are
the University of the Pacific, founded by Methodists as California Wesleyan
College, and Santa Clara University, established by Roman Catholics as Santa
Clara College. Among the most noted of California's many private institutions
are Stanford University (founded in 1885), in Stanford; the University of
Southern California (1879), in Los Angeles; California Institute of Technology
(1891), in Pasadena; Claremont Colleges, an association of five colleges, in
Claremont; Mills College (1852), in Oakland; and Whittier College (1887), in
Whittier.
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