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University of California, Los Angeles

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2314084

University of California, Los Angeles

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University of California, Los Angeles

The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California, United States. Its academic roots were established in 1881 as a normal school then known as the southern branch of the California State Normal School which later evolved into San José State University. The branch was transferred to the University of California to become the Southern Branch of the University of California in 1919, making it the second-oldest of the ten-campus University of California system after the University of California, Berkeley.

UCLA offers 337 undergraduate and graduate degree programs in a range of disciplines, enrolling about 31,600 undergraduate and 14,300 graduate and professional students annually. It received 174,914 undergraduate applications for Fall 2022, including transfers, the most of any university in the United States. The university is organized into the College of Letters and Science and twelve professional schools. Six of the schools offer undergraduate degree programs: Arts and Architecture, Engineering and Applied Science, Music, Nursing, Public Affairs, and Theater, Film and Television. Three others are graduate-level professional health science schools: Medicine, Dentistry, and Public Health. Its three remaining schools are Education & Information Studies, Management and Law.

UCLA student-athletes compete as the Bruins in the Big Ten Conference. They won 124 NCAA team championships while in the Big Ten and the Pac-12 Conference, second only to Stanford University's 128 team titles. 436 Bruins have made Olympic teams, winning 284 Olympic medals: 141 gold, 74 silver and 69 bronze. UCLA has been represented in every Olympics since the university's founding (except in 1924) and has had a gold medalist in every Olympics in which the U.S. has participated since 1932.

As of October 2025, 19 Nobel laureates, 11 Rhodes scholars, 3 Turing Award winners, 2 Chief Scientists of the U.S. Air Force, 1 Pritzker Prize winner, 7 Pulitzer Prize winners, 2 U.S. Poet laureates, 1 Gauss prize winner, and 1 Fields Medalist have been affiliated with it as faculty, researchers and alumni. As of April 2025, 61 associated faculty members have been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, 17 to the American Philosophical Society, 34 to the National Academy of Engineering, 49 to the National Academy of Medicine, 29 to the National Academy of Inventors, and 71 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In March 1881, at the request of state senator Reginaldo Francisco del Valle, the California State Legislature authorized the creation of a southern branch of the California State Normal School (now San José State University) in downtown Los Angeles to train teachers for the growing population of Southern California. The Los Angeles branch of the California State Normal School opened on August 29, 1882, on what is now the site of the Central Library of the Los Angeles Public Library system. The facility included a demonstration school where teachers-in-training could practice their techniques with children. That elementary school would become the present day UCLA Lab School. In 1887, the branch campus became independent and changed its name to Los Angeles State Normal School.

In 1914, the school moved to a new campus on Vermont Avenue (now the site of Los Angeles City College) in East Hollywood. In 1917, UC Regent Edward Augustus Dickson, the only regent representing the Southland at the time, and Ernest Carroll Moore, Director of the Normal School, began to lobby the State Legislature to enable the school to become the second University of California campus, after UC Berkeley. They met resistance from UC Berkeley alumni, Northern California members of the state legislature and then-UC President Benjamin Ide Wheeler, who were all vigorously opposed to the idea of a southern campus.[citation needed]

The state constitution expressly protected the autonomy of the University of California from political interference, which meant the Legislature could not directly command the Board of Regents to create a southern campus. However, the state constitution did not prohibit the state legislature from passing legislation to create additional state universities. The supporters of the Los Angeles State Normal School used the possibility of that scenario to pressure the Board of Regents to voluntarily accept the normal school as UC's southern campus.

On May 23, 1919, the Southern Californians' efforts were rewarded when Governor William D. Stephens signed Assembly Bill 626 into law, which acquired the land and buildings and transformed the Los Angeles Normal School into the Southern Branch of the University of California. The same legislation added its general undergraduate program, the Junior College. The Southern Branch campus opened on September 15 of that year, offering two-year undergraduate programs to 250 Junior College students and 1,250 students in the Teachers College. While University of Southern California students criticized the "branch" as a mere "twig", Southern Californians continued to fight Northern Californians for the right to three and then four years of instruction. In December 1923, the Board of Regents authorized a fourth year of instruction and transformed the Junior College into the College of Letters and Science, which awarded its first bachelor's degrees in June 1925.

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