University Facts

• Missouri State offers opportunities and advantages as Missouri’s second largest university.
• Missouri State is a major university with more than 18,000 students from Missouri, nearly every other state and 85 other countries.
• Our students experience college life at its best, with NCAA Division I athletics and more than 250 student organizations.
• Missouri State’s statewide mission in public affairs earned national recognition through the John Templeton Foundation’s Guide to Colleges that Encourage Character Development.
• Missouri State offers more than 150 undergraduate majors and 43 graduate programs—many are the state’s strongest and largest of their kind.
• Nearly 90 percent of our 700 full-time faculty members have a doctorate or the highest degree in their field.
• The main campus of Missouri State University, founded in 1905, is one of the 13 four year, public supported institutions of higher education in Missouri.
  In addition to the main campus at Springfield, there is a two-year branch campus in West Plains and a research campus in Mountain Grove.
• The University was given a regional mission by legislative act in 1919. That mission was expanded in the spring of 1995. The name of the University’s governing board was also changed to the Board of Governors, and its composition reflects the change in mission. The most recent statement of mission, approved by the Board of Governors in July 2000, includes a special statewide emphasis on public affairs, as well as future development along five themes:
  1. Professional education
  2. Health
  3. Business and economic development
  4. Creative arts
  5. Science and the environment

University Structure