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Facts about Penn State

Penn State is one of the leading comprehensive universities in the United States. Unlike many of its counterparts in the public sector of higher education nationally, Penn State is not owned and operated by the state government. It is an instrumentality of the Commonwealth and has been designated one of four "state-related" universities, but it is separately incorporated, with an independent Board of Trustees. The trustees include the governor and the secretaries of the state Departments of Agriculture, Education, and Environmental Protection as ex officio members. The University sets its own tuition levels and other charges and retains the resulting income for operations. It controls its own purchasing decisions. Penn State's faculty and staff members are employees of the University, not the Commonwealth.

Penn State owes its public character in part to its designation as the Commonwealth's only land-grant university. Land-grant institutions, established by Congress in 1862, assumed a broad mission of teaching, research, and public service in exchange for a modest endowment created through the sale of federal land. Land-grant institutions also agreed to offer instruction at a cost affordable to people of average means.

Penn State enrolls more than 90,000 students and confers about 14,000 degrees annually. About half of these students are enrolled on the main campus at University Park. The remaining students are distributed among more than 20 other campus locations across Pennsylvania including the College of Medicine at the Hershey Medical Center. Since its founding, the University has conferred more than 500,000 degrees; more than half of these have been granted since 1980. Penn State has more than 400,000 living alumni. One in every 720 Americans, and one in every 70 Pennsylvanians, is a graduate of Penn State.

One in eight Pennsylvanians with a college degree is a Penn State graduate.

One in 122 Americans with a college degree is a Penn State graduate.

The Smeal College of Business is located on the Penn State's University Park campus. The University Park campus is the academic, research, and administrative hub of the University. There are currently 6,300 undergraduate and graduate students enrolled in the Smeal College, and over 68,000 alumni.

More than a thousand corporations and government agencies conduct employment interviews annually at the University Park campus; virtually all Fortune 500 companies visit the campus at least once a year to recruit personnel.

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Steven Huddart
Smeal College of Business, Penn State University, University Park, PA 16802-3603 USA
(814) 865-3271
(814) 863-8393 fax
huddart@psu.edu
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