Cal State Monterey Bay provides over 7,500 students an extraordinary opportunity to learn on a residential campus just one mile from the beautiful Monterey Bay shores. Our diverse student body receives personal attention in small classes while pursuing degrees in 25 undergraduate and seven graduate majors.
Our mission is to build a multicultural learning community founded on academic excellence from which all partners in the educational process emerge prepared to contribute productively, responsibly, and ethically to California and the global community.
Founded in 1994 on the former site of Fort Ord by educators and community leaders, Cal State Monterey Bay faculty and staff build on that legacy as we explore innovative ways to meet the needs of a new generation of students while simultaneously powering the Monterey County economy.
While we serve students from California's entire state, 38 percent of our undergraduates come from Monterey, San Benito, and Santa Cruz counties. We pride ourselves on making higher education accessible to traditionally underserved and low-income populations. Seventy-two percent of our students receive some form of financial aid. Fifty-three percent of our students are among the first generation of their family to go to college. Moreover, with 52 percent of our students living on campus, we are among the most residential universities in the CSU.
On September 4, 1995, President Bill Clinton joined with local, state, and federal officials at the inauguration of this campus, the 21st in the Cal State University system. Today, Cal State Monterey Bay has made a remarkably successful transition from the former Fort Ord into a thriving university.
Last fall, we opened the doors to the largest group of first-time freshmen in our history, as our overall enrollment grew to more than 7,500 students. As our university has grown, we have maintained the close-knit campus culture prized by our students and our graduates since its founding.
Students are drawn here by our outstanding academic programs, many of which are closely tied to regional needs and the Central Coast's unique geography. Our campus is adjacent to one of the world's most productive agricultural regions and some of its most attractive tourist destinations. The Pacific Ocean at our back door provides abundant recreational opportunities, as well as a site for innovative research that reflects our campus's focus on environmental stewardship and sustainability.
Inspired by our founding Vision, innovators have always found a home here at Cal State Monterey Bay. In fact, by at least one measure, CSUMB is the state's most innovative campus. When Gov. Jerry Brown established a $50 million program to reward higher education innovation this year, 52 colleges and universities from across the state applied. Two CSUMB projects – our CSIT-in-3 collaboration with Hartnell College and our Math Huge developmental program – won awards, receiving a total of $8 million, more than any other campus.
The campus has also established an unmatched record in service-learning and community outreach. Cal State Monterey Bay is a two-time winner of the President's Award for Higher Education Community Service and has been named to the Community Service Honor Roll in the years it has not received the top honor. That makes us the most decorated university for service learning in the nation.
California State University, Monterey Bay (CSUMB) is envisioned as a comprehensive state university that values service through high-quality education. The campus will be distinctive in serving California's diverse people, especially the working class and historically undereducated and low-income populations. It will feature an enriched living and learning environment and year-round operation. The identity of the university will be framed by substantive commitment to multilingual, multicultural, gender-equitable learning. The university will be a collaborative, intellectual community distinguished by partnerships with existing public and private institutions. These cooperative agreements enable students, faculty, and staff to cross institutional boundaries for innovative instruction, broadly defined scholarly and creative activity, and coordinated community service.
The university will invest in preparation for the future through the integrated and experimental use of technologies as resources to people, catalysts for learning, and providers of increased access and enriched quality learning. The curriculum of CSUMB will be student and society centered and of sufficient breadth and depth to meet statewide and regional needs, specifically those involving both inner-city and isolated rural populations, and needs relevant to communities in the immediate Tri-County region (Monterey, Santa Cruz, and San Benito). The programs of instruction will strive for distinction, building on regional assets in developing specialty clusters in such areas as the sciences (marine, atmospheric, and environmental), visual and performing arts, and related humanities languages, cultures, and international studies education business studies of human behavior, information, and communication, within broad curricular areas and professional study.
The university will develop a culture of innovation in its overall conceptual design and organization and will utilize new and varied pedagogical and instructional approaches, including distance learning. Institutional programs will value and cultivate creative and productive talents of students, faculty, and staff, seek ways to contribute to the economy of the state, the well-being of our communities, and the quality of life and development of its students, faculty, and service areas.
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