Land, Sea, Space & Sun
When the United States established Land Grant colleges and universities in the 1860s, OSU was one of the original institutions created to make higher education accessible and affordable to all Americans.
Over the years, additional federal designations have been added for Sea Grant, Space Grant and Sun Grant institutions. Other than Cornell, OSU is the only university in America to hold all four - a distinction that provides real value for the 19,700 students (more than 80 percent of whom are Oregonians) who call OSU home.
That means, in part, that Oregon State has one of the broadest, most diverse research programs in the nation. This breadth is so wide-ranging, in fact, that OSU is the only Oregon campus to have earned the Carnegie Foundation's premier designation, reserved for campuses that have "very high research activity."
Behind those designations lie strengths in such areas as forestry, marine science, nanoscience and microtechnology, agricultural sciences, history, public health, veterinary medicine, creative writing, conservation biology, entrepreneurship and more.
The university has grown dramatically: Beaver alumni living around the world now number nearly 150,000. But OSU has never lost sight of its original mission. Making its intellectual resources available to students from Oregon and beyond will always be OSU's primary focus.