About the UW

People

Enrollment and degrees

• Campuses in Seattle, Bothell and Tacoma; 836 degree options across 469 programs
• Educational and research facilities in Spokane and Friday Harbor, Washington; Rome, Italy; and León, Spain
• Across all campuses and facilities: 60,000+ students and 4,300+ faculty

ENROLLMENT TRENDS
GLOBAL ENGAGEMENT

Honors and awards

• #1 most innovative public university in the world according to Reuters (#5 overall)
• Consistently ranked among the top public universities in the world (#2 U.S. News & World Report Global University Rankings; #4 Times Higher Education; #3 Shanghai Jiao-Tong)
• UW Professor Emeritus David J. Thouless won the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics, becoming the UW’s seventh Nobel laureate
• UW Professor Mary-Claire King was awarded the National Medal of Science in May 2016.
• Four UW professors won the 2021 Breakthrough Prize — the so-called ‘Oscars of Science’

Impact

• The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation invested $279 million to help the UW’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation expand its work over the next decade.
• The UW has 104 active startups in Washington — and has helped launch 258 companies since 1990.
• More than 7,000 undergraduates conduct research alongside leading faculty, from engineering labs on campus to remote areas of Alaska and around the world.
• The UW receives more federal research dollars than any other public university in the nation — in FY21, the UW received $1.77 billion in total research awards.
• According to the 2019 Economic Impact Report, the UW supports or sustains a total of 100,520 jobs — one out of every 37 jobs in the state, with an annual economic impact of $15.7 billion.

Access

• 74% of UW students are residents of Washington.
• Approximately 66% of all UW undergraduates graduate with no known debt, and those who borrow still graduate with less debt than the national average.
• In 2020-21, 28% of UW undergraduates from Washington (approximately 10,100) are eligible for the Husky Promise, which covers the tuition and fees of students with financial need.
• In 2020-21, 24% of UW undergraduates are eligible for Federal Pell Grant funding. As of the most recent data (2020-21), more than 10,900 UW undergraduates received Pell Grants — more than at all the Ivy League schools combined.