By the Numbers
It's easy to get lost in all the numbers of square footage, endowed totals and rising national rankings. What you'll find, though, is that the students, faculty and staff at the University of Arkansas are doing the right things, the smart things and the wise things to make education, research and service more profound.
Our growth in student population, the construction of new buildings and the U of A's continuing rise in national rankings are reflections of what we've been doing right. The rankings are not a destination on the road trip of college life but merely a nice reflection to see in the rear-view mirror.
Going Beyond Your Dreams
Our undergraduate students have excelled at attaining prestigious scholarships due in part to the support they receive from our faculty and staff. Our students must still have drive and ambition and a good sense of how to make the world a better place.
In the last three years, more than 125 of our undergraduates have won State Undergraduate Research Fellowships to support research projects they are pursuing with faculty mentors.
Our institution has the highest graduation rate in Arkansas, a rate that has continued upward during the last decade. The average high school GPA of our freshmen, now above 3.5, also continues to rise.
U of A teams have won 20 national business plan competitions in recent years and over $2 million in cash prizes.
University of Arkansas athletes and alumni have won 21 Olympic medals over the years.
For more, visit our full list of undergraduates who have earned prestigious national and international awards.
53
Goldwater Scholars
77
Fulbright Scholars
44
Gates Millennium Scholars
8
Marshall Scholars
23
Truman Scholars
10
Rhodes Scholars
9
Udall Scholars
132
NSF Graduate Research Fellowships
Built for Success
We've poured a lot of resources into the improvement of our campus in the last five years, renovating, expanding and building anew. Just the last year, a new residential hall was added and another was renovated as a home for honors students.
Two academic buildings on the National Register of Historic Places — Ozark Hall and Vol Walker Hall — were also renovated with additions, one to create a home for our nationally prominent Honors College and a second to provide facilities for our top-ranked School of Architecture.
In 2015, we finished renovation of another historic building — the 1937 Field House in which musicians such as Louis Armstrong, Chuck Berry and Dave Brubeck have performed — into the 600-seat Jim and Joyce Faulkner Performing Arts Center.
Our Greek Life membership is also growing at a phenomenal rate. New fraternities and sororities have joined the university in the last couple of years even as established chapters grow their ranks and enlarge the size of their chapter houses.
The newest addition to campus is an academic building called Champions Hall, which provides lab space for biological sciences, classrooms for mathematics and airy study spaces.
1
Greek amphitheater
27,558
New record enrollment in 2017
180,000
Names of graduates engraved on our sidewalks
2,000,000
Volumes in the university libraries
898,900,000
Dollars in university endowment
Research and Invention
The latest economic impact survey indicated the University of Arkansas has an economic impact in excess of $1.2 billion on the state. The Arkansas Research and Technology Park contributes $55 million of that.
The U.S. Department of Education awarded a $35 million five-year grant to the College of Education and Health Professions and the Arkansas Department of Education to fund a program aimed at improving the education and career outcomes of low-income Arkansas teenagers with disabilities.
The U.S. Department of Energy awarded a $2 million grant to a collaborative research partnership to develop new technologies for fuel-efficient vehicles.
Scientific American ranked The Sustainability Consortium, a program jointly funded by the University of Arkansas and Arizona State University, among the top 10 World Changing Ideas for 2012.
The Arkansas Research and Technology Park, managed by the University of Arkansas, has helped three dozen promising tech firms get started, firms that have created nearly 350 jobs that pay an average salary of $80,000 each annually.
The University of Arkansas Community Design Center's design proposal for the Trailhead Complex at the Maumelle River Nature Center won the 2013 Unbuilt Architecture and Design Award from the Boston Society of Architects.
The National Science Foundation provided a grant to research plant fungi that cause disease on the leaves of crops such as corn, sorghum and soybean and the strategies they use to infect the plant.
The U.S. Department of Transportation awarded the university $1.4 million to create the Maritime Transportation Research and Education Center, a consortium of researchers with expertise on maritime and multimodal transportation.
153,000,000
Dollars in 2017 research spending
36
Tech start-ups at Research and Technology Park
35
Faculty Early Career Development Awards for faculty
45
Intellectual property disclosures from faculty this year
Rankings
Nathanael Franks was the U of A’s first male athlete to be a named McWhorter Scholar.
In Kiplinger’s 25 Best College Values Under $30,000 a Year, U of A ranked No. 5.
The women’s indoor track team won its first indoor national title in 2015 and its first outdoor national title in 2016.
The Division of Advancement collected 736 children’s books for Arkansas Reads, the second largest donation ever.
The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching elevated the University of Arkansas to its highest research status, a level at which only 2 percent of the nation's universities and colleges operate.
The Chronicle of Higher Education rated the University of Arkansas as the 7th fastest-growing public university in the country.
The National Jurist ranked the U of A School of Law as one of the top five best values among American law schools.
The Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design was ranked 12th among undergraduate architecture programs at public land-grant universities by the Design Futures Council.
Our athletic teams once again competed so well collectively that the University of Arkansas scored among the Top 30 schools competing for the Learfield Sports Directors Cup, the sixth time in seven years.
U.S. News & World Report ranked Fayetteville the 5th best town in America to live in for 2017.
Forbes magazine ranked Fayetteville the No. 1 city in the Southeastern Conference.
1st best small architecture school design program
6th lowest student debt-ranking for American law schools
10th fastest-growing public university
13th best rehabilitation counseling program
19th best public Honors College
21st best in national job placement for law schools
22nd best in category of agriculture
25th best public online bachelor's degrees programs
26th best public business college
29th best public online graduate engineering program
31st best industrial engineering program
39th best creative writing program
64th overall national ranking among public universities