California State University, Los Angeles

California State University, Los Angeles (also known as Cal State L.A., CSULA, or CSLA) is a public comprehensive university, part of the California State University (CSU) system.

CSULA has a student body of approximately 21,000 students primarily from the greater Los Angeles area, as well as more than 215,000 alumni.

Rankings

Cal State L.A.'s parking received press coverage for pioneering the concept of underground parking; to deal with the limitations of ground space for expansion under the initial California State expansion plans of the early 1960s. Developer Louis Lesser developed "underground parking” in his off campus residential housing development for the university in 1964, with only a two level underground parking structure considered so unusual as to merit a separate newspaper section header, “Parking Underground”, and calling the parking “subterranean spaces." CSU Los Angeles has repeatedly been named by U.S. News & World Report as having one of the nation’s top 100 undergraduate business schools. U.S. News & World Report also rates the engineering program in its America's best colleges issue among the nation’s best undergraduate programs for more than a decade. Cal State L.A. is the only highly ranked public undergraduate (master’s-awarding) university in the greater Los Angeles area. The 2008 issue ranked Cal State L.A.'s engineering program 34th. Cal state L.A. is one of only six CSU programs in the top ranked tier of engineering programs accredited by the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET). Since 2000, when it began surveying nursing graduate programs, U.S. News and World Report’s “America’s Best Graduate Schools” issues have listed the nursing graduate program among the top programs in California.

Programs

Cal State L.A. is organized into eight colleges which house a total of four schools and approximately 50 academic departments, divisions and interdisciplinary programs offering a variety of majors The eight colleges offer nationally recognized science, arts, business, criminal justice, engineering, nursing, education and humanities programs. CSULA is home to the critically acclaimed Luckman Jazz-Orchestra and to a unique university center for gifted students as young as 11.

Cal State LA's academic departments and programs are organized into 8 colleges:

• College of Arts and Letters
• College of Business and Economics
• Charter College of Education
• College of Engineering, Computer Science, and Technology
• College of Health and Human Services
• College of Natural and Social Sciences
• College of Extended Studies and International Programs
• Honors College

Campus

The campus is located in the eastern region of Los Angeles, California, United States, in the University Hills district, facing the San Gabriel Mountains, at the center of Los Angeles metropolitan area just five miles (8 km) east of Downtown Los Angeles. It is located next to two major interstate highways: Interstate 10 and Interstate 710. The 175-acre (71 ha) hilltop campus core is home to the nation's first Charter College of Education, a NASA-funded SPACE program, Rockefeller-supported humanities center, a National Science Foundation funded environmental research center and other award-winning engineering programs. U.S. News has ranked CSULA's undergraduate business program as one of the best in the nation. The School of Nursing is considered to be one of the best in the state of California.

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