"The university is situated in Santa Clara, California (pop. 104,000), adjacent to the city of San Jose, California in Santa Clara County (pop. 1.8 million), which anchors the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area. Also known by the abbreviation SCU, its students and 71,000 alumni are called “Santa Clarans” and its athletics teams are called the Broncos.
Built around historic Mission Santa Clara, the present university is home to a population of nearly 5,000 undergraduate and 3,500 masters, J.D., and Ph.D. students. The institution employs over 450 full time faculty members, who are divided between four professional schools and the College of Arts and Sciences, all of which are located on the 104 acre (0.4 km²) mission campus. For the 2005–2006 academic year, the university's operating budget was $255 million, and the university's endowment was nearly $530 million. For the same period, undergraduate tuition was $28,899 and the cost of room and board was $10,032.
The Carnegie Corporation classifies Santa Clara as a master's level university, which denotes that the institution offers few, if any, PhD programs. During 2004-2005, the university conferred five PhD degrees in engineering. In U.S. News & World Report's collegiate rankings, among master's universities on the West Coast, Santa Clara consistently ranks second.
Santa Clara is civilly chartered and governed by a board of trustees, which appoints the president. By internal statute, the president must be a member of the Jesuit order, although the membership of the board is primarily lay. About forty Jesuit priests and brothers are active teachers and administrators in various departments and centers. Jesuits comprise around seven percent of the permanent faculty and hold teaching positions in biology, computer engineering, counseling psychology, economics, English, history, law, philosophy, physics, political science, psychology, religious studies, and theater arts. They also serve in campus ministry and residence-hall ministry, and some act as faculty directors in residential learning communities.
SCU maintains its Catholic and Jesuit affiliation and supports numerous initiatives intended to further its religious mission. Students are invited to attend the Sunday evening student Masses in the mission church and encouraged to participate in campus ministry programs and lectures. All bachelor’s degrees require three religious studies courses as part of the academic core. An emphasis on social justice is furthered through the Pedro Arrupe Partnership and Kolvenbach Solidarity Programs, which offer service opportunities in the community and immersion opportunities throughout the world. The Markkula Center for Applied Ethics and the Center for Science, Technology, and Society also have programs that serve the university's Catholic, Jesuit identity."
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