Boise State University (BSU) is a
public research university in
Boise, Idaho. Founded in 1932 by the
Episcopal Church, it became an independent junior college in 1934 and has been awarding
baccalaureate and master's degrees It became a public institution in 1969.
Boise State offers more than 100 graduate programs, including the
MBA and
MAcc programs in the College of Business and Economics;
master's and
PhD PHD or PhD may refer to:
* Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), an academic qualification
Entertainment
* '' PhD: Phantasy Degree'', a Korean comic series
* ''Piled Higher and Deeper'', a web comic
* Ph.D. (band), a 1980s British group
** Ph.D. (Ph.D. albu ...
programs in the Colleges of Engineering, Arts & Sciences, and Education;
MPA program in the School of Public Service; and the
MPH program in the College of Health Sciences. In the
Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education
The Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, or simply the Carnegie Classification, is a framework for classifying colleges and universities in the United States. It was created in 1970 by the Carnegie Foundation for the Adva ...
, it is among "R2: Doctoral Universities – High research activity".
The university's intercollegiate athletic teams, the
Broncos, compete in the
Mountain West Conference (MWC) in
NCAA Division I.
History
The school became Idaho's third state university in 1974, after the
University of Idaho (1889) and
Idaho State University (1963). Boise State awards
associate,
bachelor's
A bachelor's degree (from Middle Latin ''baccalaureus'') or baccalaureate (from Modern Latin ''baccalaureatus'') is an undergraduate academic degree awarded by colleges and universities upon completion of a course of study lasting three to six ye ...
, master's, and doctoral degrees, and is accredited by the
Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities. , it has over 75,000 living
alumni.
Campus
The campus is located near
downtown
''Downtown'' is a term primarily used in North America by English speakers to refer to a city's sometimes commercial, cultural and often the historical, political and geographic heart. It is often synonymous with its central business distric ...
Boise, on the south bank of the
Boise River
The Boise River is a U.S. Geological Survey. National Hydrography Dataset high-resolution flowline data. , accessed May 3, 2011 tributary of the Snake River in the Northwestern United States. It drains a rugged portion of the Sawtooth Range in sou ...
, opposite
Julia Davis Park. With more than 170 buildings, the campus is at an
elevation of above
sea level, bounded by Capitol Boulevard on the west and Broadway Avenue to the east. Boise State has spent over $300 million since 2003 on academic, residential, and athletics facilities across campus. Through the 1930s, the site was the
city's airport.
Boise State broke ground in May 2017 on a $42 million Center for the Fine Arts, which will house sculpture, metalwork, painting, graphic design and other visual arts, as well as gallery space and a digital "World Museum" devoted to high-tech arts experiences.
Albertsons Library
The school's library is named for grocery pioneer and longtime Boise resident
Joe Albertson
Joseph Albert Albertson (October 17, 1906 – January 20, 1993) was an American businessman, the founder of the Albertsons (SuperValu), Albertsons chain of grocery stores.
Early life
Born in Yukon, Oklahoma, Yukon, Oklahoma Territory, Albertson ...
. It houses more than 650,000 books, over 100,000 periodicals, 107 public terminals for student use, and access to over 300 online databases. The physical structure features a public lounge area, and houses the College of Innovation and Design, including the fast growing degree program in Gaming, Interactive Mobile and Media.
Morrison Center
The "Velma V.
Morrison Center for the Performing Arts" has 2,000 seats in its primary performance hall, and hosts a wide variety of fine arts performances, including the Broadway in Boise series, concerts and other events. The venue opened its doors in April 1984.
Computer Science Department
The computer science department moved away from the main campus to a new building in downtown Boise. The CS department occupies 53,549 gross square feet, the full second and third floors of the building. The university's CS program is now located in the same building as Clearwater Analytics and within short walking distance of about 20 more of Boise's top technology companies.
Micron Center for Materials Research
The Micron Center for Materials Research was established with a $25 million gift from
Micron Technology
Micron Technology, Inc. is an American producer of computer memory and computer data storage including dynamic random-access memory, flash memory, and USB flash drives. It is headquartered in Boise, Idaho. Its consumer products, including ...
, which is headquartered in Boise.
Scheduled for completion in 2020, the building was designed by Hummel Architects and Anderson Mason Dale Architects, with
Hoffman Construction
Hoffman Construction Company is a privately held construction founded in 1922. It is headquartered in Portland, Oregon. It also has an office location in Seattle. With a revenue of US$1.4 billion in FY2017, Hoffman was the 4th largest privately ...
as lead contractor. The building is designed with one research wing, planned to house sensitive equipment, and state of the art research laboratories and a second wing, to hold classrooms, and office space. This latest donation by Micron marks a total of $40 million invested in materials science and engineering programs and associated research at BSU,
resulting in a full complement of degrees in
materials science and engineering including bachelor's, master's and doctoral programs.
Other campuses
Extended Studies at Boise State offers regional programming at the
College of Western Idaho in
Nampa
The Namibia Press Agency (NAMPA) is the national news agency of the Namibia, Republic of Namibia. It was founded in 1987 under the name Namibia Press Association as a SWAPO partisan press agency, and resuscitated after Namibian War of Independence ...
,
Mountain Home Air Force Base
Mountain Home Air Force Base is a United States Air Force (USAF) installation in the western United States. Located in southwestern Idaho in Elmore County, the base is southwest of Mountain Home, which is southeast of Boise via Interstate ...
,
Gowen Field,
Twin Falls,
Lewiston, and
Coeur d'Alene. BSU also offers 29 degrees and certificates fully online. Beginning in 2016, Boise State began partnering with the
Harvard Business School
Harvard Business School (HBS) is the graduate business school of Harvard University, a private research university in Boston, Massachusetts. It is consistently ranked among the top business schools in the world and offers a large full-time MBA p ...
to offer the Harvard Business School Online business fundamentals program to Idaho students and the business community. This collaboration is the only such Harvard collaboration with a public U.S. university.
Academics and organization
Boise State's more than 190 fields of study are organized these colleges:
* Arts and Sciences
* Business and Economics
* Education
* Engineering
* Graduate Studies
* Health Sciences
*
School of Public Service
* Innovation and Design
Boise State's fall enrollment in 2016 was 23,886 students, and approximately 76 percent of these students were Idaho residents.
More than 90 percent of Boise State's first-year students come directly from high school.
In the 2015–2016 school year, Boise State awarded diplomas to 3,916 distinct graduates, including 18 doctorates, 10 education specialists, 670 master's and 2,998 bachelor's degrees.
The university has "High Research Activity" as scored by the
Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education
The Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, or simply the Carnegie Classification, is a framework for classifying colleges and universities in the United States. It was created in 1970 by the Carnegie Foundation for the Adva ...
.
Publishing
Since 1971 the university has published the ''Western Writers Series'', monographs focusing on authors of the
American Frontier
The American frontier, also known as the Old West or the Wild West, encompasses the geography, history, folklore, and culture associated with the forward wave of United States territorial acquisitions, American expansion in mainland North Amer ...
and
American West
The Western United States (also called the American West, the Far West, and the West) is the region comprising the westernmost states of the United States. As American settlement in the U.S. expanded westward, the meaning of the term ''the Wes ...
. The university also maintains an on-line library of publications and documents related to Idaho history through the Albertsons Library.
A not-for-profit literary publisher, Ahsahta was founded in 1974 at Boise State University to preserve the best works by early poets of the American West. Its name, ahsahta, is the Mandan word meaning "Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep," and was first recorded by members of the Lewis and Clark expedition; the founding editors chose the word to honor the press's original mission to publish Western poetry.
The Center for Idaho History and Politics offers a nine-credit place-based field school called "Investigate Boise" which focuses on heritage, government, and urban affairs. Each series of classes results in a student written and faculty edited publication.
Athletics
Boise State's athletic nickname is the
Broncos, and the official mascot is
Buster Bronco. Men's teams include
football
Football is a family of team sports that involve, to varying degrees, kicking a ball to score a goal. Unqualified, the word ''football'' normally means the form of football that is the most popular where the word is used. Sports commonly c ...
,
basketball,
cross country,
track and field,
golf,
tennis, and
baseball (to resume play in 2020 after a forty-year hiatus). The baseball program was then cut in July 2020. Its women's teams include
volleyball,
basketball, cross country, swimming and diving,
soccer
Association football, more commonly known as football or soccer, is a team sport played between two teams of 11 players who primarily use their feet to propel the ball around a rectangular field called a pitch. The objective of the game is ...
, track and field,
gymnastics, golf, softball and tennis. Most of these teams compete in the
Mountain West Conference (MWC).
Boise State College joined the
NCAA in
1970
Events
January
* January 1 – Unix time epoch reached at 00:00:00 UTC.
* January 5 – The 7.1 Tonghai earthquake shakes Tonghai County, Yunnan province, China, with a maximum Mercalli intensity scale, Mercalli intensity of X (''Extrem ...
in the university division (
Division I), except for
football
Football is a family of team sports that involve, to varying degrees, kicking a ball to score a goal. Unqualified, the word ''football'' normally means the form of football that is the most popular where the word is used. Sports commonly c ...
, which was in the
college division The NCAA College Division was a historic subdivision of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) consisting of member schools competing at a lower level of college sports. The NCAA initially divided schools into a College Division and a ...
(later
Division II) for the first
eight seasons
8 is a number, numeral, and glyph.
8 or eight may also refer to:
Years
* AD 8, the eighth year of the AD era
* 8 BC, the eighth year before the AD era
Art
*The Eight (Ashcan School), a group of twentieth century painters associated with the A ...
.
Big Sky Conference football moved up to the new
Division I-AA (now
FCS) in
1978
Events January
* January 1 – Air India Flight 855, a Boeing 747 passenger jet, crashes off the coast of Bombay, killing 213.
* January 5 – Bülent Ecevit, of Republican People's Party, CHP, forms the new government of Turkey (42nd go ...
, and the Broncos won the
national championship two years later. BSU moved up to
Division I-A (now
FBS) in
1996
File:1996 Events Collage.png, From left, clockwise: A Centennial Olympic Park bombing, bomb explodes at Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta, set off by a radical Anti-abortion violence, anti-abortionist; The center fuel tank explodes on TWA Flight 8 ...
in the
Big West Conference, joined the
Western Athletic Conference (WAC) in
2001
The September 11 attacks against the United States by Al-Qaeda, which Casualties of the September 11 attacks, killed 2,977 people and instigated the global war on terror, were a defining event of 2001. The United States led a Participants in ...
, and the Mountain West in
2011
File:2011 Events Collage.png, From top left, clockwise: a protester partaking in Occupy Wall Street heralds the beginning of the Occupy movement; protests against Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, who was killed that October; a young man celebrate ...
. The last two moves came after the conferences dropped sponsorship of football.
Albertsons Stadium
Albertsons Stadium is home to the
Boise State football program. It hosted to the
NCAA Division I Track and Field Championships in
1994
File:1994 Events Collage.png, From left, clockwise: The 1994 Winter Olympics are held in Lillehammer, Norway; The Kaiser Permanente building after the 1994 Northridge earthquake; A model of the MS Estonia, which Sinking of the MS Estonia, sank in ...
and
1999
File:1999 Events Collage.png, From left, clockwise: The funeral procession of King Hussein of Jordan in Amman; the 1999 İzmit earthquake kills over 17,000 people in Turkey; the Columbine High School massacre, one of the first major school shootin ...
, and has been the home to the
Famous Idaho Potato Bowl since
1997
File:1997 Events Collage.png, From left, clockwise: The movie set of ''Titanic'', the highest-grossing movie in history at the time; ''Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone'', is published; Comet Hale-Bopp passes by Earth and becomes one of t ...
.
Boise State Football has a long history of success starting with the junior college days and the national championship team of 1958, coached by the father of Bronco football,
Lyle Smith
Lyle Hilton Smith (March 17, 1916 – July 26, 2017) was an American football and basketball player, coach, and college athletics administrator.
He served as the head football coach at Boise Junior College—now Boise State University&mdas ...
. Now named Lyle Smith Field in Albertsons Stadium, the synthetic turf field was standard green before
1986
The year 1986 was designated as the International Year of Peace by the United Nations.
Events January
* January 1
** Aruba gains increased autonomy from the Netherlands by separating from the Netherlands Antilles.
**Spain and Portugal ente ...
. "The Blue" was the idea of
athletic director Gene Bleymaier
Eugene Anthony Bleymaier (born 1953) is an American university administrator who was most recently special advisor to the president at San Jose State University. Bleymaier was previously an athletic director, first at Boise State University from ...
and was the first non-green football field in the country. Through
2019
File:2019 collage v1.png, From top left, clockwise: Hong Kong protests turn to widespread riots and civil disobedience; House of Representatives votes to adopt articles of impeachment against Donald Trump; CRISPR gene editing first used to experim ...
, Boise State's home record was in 34 seasons on The Blue, with fifteen conference championships.
Ground was broken after the
1969
This year is notable for Apollo 11's first landing on the moon.
Events January
* January 4 – The Government of Spain hands over Ifni to Morocco.
* January 5
**Ariana Afghan Airlines Flight 701 crashes into a house on its approach to ...
season, and it opened in September
1970
Events
January
* January 1 – Unix time epoch reached at 00:00:00 UTC.
* January 5 – The 7.1 Tonghai earthquake shakes Tonghai County, Yunnan province, China, with a maximum Mercalli intensity scale, Mercalli intensity of X (''Extrem ...
with a capacity of 14,500. Subsequent expansions were completed in
1975
It was also declared the ''International Women's Year'' by the United Nations and the European Architectural Heritage Year by the Council of Europe.
Events
January
* January 1 - Watergate scandal (United States): John N. Mitchell, H. R. ...
and
1997
File:1997 Events Collage.png, From left, clockwise: The movie set of ''Titanic'', the highest-grossing movie in history at the time; ''Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone'', is published; Comet Hale-Bopp passes by Earth and becomes one of t ...
, and current capacity sits at around 37,000. In August 2010, the university unveiled a $100 million expansion plan for Bronco Stadium. The first stage will include: adding a new facility to the north endzone to house the football offices, weight room, training room, equipment room and locker room; removing the track; and adding a 13,200-seat grandstand behind the north endzone. Later stages include: lowering the field to add 3,300 seats; completing the south endzone horseshoe; building an east side skybox; and renovating the east concourse. Seating capacity for the fully expanded Bronco Stadium will exceed 55,000.
ExtraMile Arena
Known as the "Boise State University Pavilion" until June 2004, and "Taco Bell Arena" between 2004 and 2019, ExtraMile Arena is home to BSU basketball, wrestling, women's gymnastics, community events, and several concerts each year. Opened in May 1982, the arena
seats 12,380 on three levels. It has hosted rounds one and two of the
NCAA basketball tournament on eight occasions from
1983
The year 1983 saw both the official beginning of the Internet and the first mobile cellular telephone call.
Events January
* January 1 – The migration of the ARPANET to Internet protocol suite, TCP/IP is officially completed (this is consid ...
to
2009
File:2009 Events Collage V2.png, From top left, clockwise: The vertical stabilizer of Air France Flight 447 is pulled out from the Atlantic Ocean; Barack Obama becomes the first African American to become President of the United States; 2009 Iran ...
, and the third and fourth rounds of the
NCAA women's tournament in
2002
File:2002 Events Collage.png, From left, clockwise: The 2002 Winter Olympics are held in Salt Lake City; Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother and her daughter Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon die; East Timor gains East Timor independence, indepe ...
.
The construction of the pavilion began in February 1980 on the site of the tennis courts and a portion of the BSU
baseball field
A baseball field, also called a ball field or baseball diamond, is the field upon which the game of baseball is played. The term can also be used as a metonym for a baseball park. The term sandlot is sometimes used, although this usually refers ...
. The Bronco baseball team played their home games in 1980 at Borah Field (now Bill Wigle Field) at
Borah High School, and the program was discontinued that May. The tennis courts were rebuilt immediately west of the arena, on the former baseball field (infield & right field).
Student life
Boise State's enrollment for the 2020-21 year was 24,103 students, with approximately 66 percent Idaho residents.
Boise State University has the largest graduate enrollment in Idaho.
More than 90 percent of Boise State's first-year students come directly from high school.
Housing
Boise State is considered a commuter school, due to more than 86% of its students living off campus. The dominant form of school-supported housing are co-ed residence halls.
Social fraternities and sororities
Boise State has seen a growing in
Greek community on campus, from less than a couple hundred in 2010 to over 1,400 today. There are nine
fraternities:
Alpha Kappa Lambda
Alpha Kappa Lambda (), commonly known as AKL or Alpha Kapp, is an American collegiate social fraternity founded at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1914. Today, it operates approximately 30 active chapters and has approximately 28,000 li ...
,
Alpha Tau Omega
Alpha Tau Omega (), commonly known as ATO, is an American social fraternity founded at the Virginia Military Institute in 1865 by Otis Allan Glazebrook. The fraternity has around 250 active and inactive chapters and colonies in the United Stat ...
,
Delta Sigma Phi,
Delta Upsilon,
Kappa Sigma,
Lambda Theta Phi,
Phi Gamma Delta
Phi Gamma Delta (), commonly known as Fiji, is a social fraternity with more than 144 active chapters and 10 colonies across the United States and Canada. It was founded at Jefferson College, Pennsylvania, in 1848. Along with Phi Kappa Psi, Phi ...
,
Pi Kappa Phi,
Sigma Chi,
Sigma Lambda Beta,
Tau Kappa Epsilon,
Pi Kappa Alpha
Pi Kappa Alpha (), commonly known as PIKE, is a college fraternity founded at the University of Virginia in 1868. The fraternity has over 225 chapters and colonies across the United States and abroad with over 15,500 undergraduate members over 30 ...
, and nine sororities:
Alpha Chi Omega,
Alpha Xi Delta,
Alpha Sigma Alpha,
Alpha Gamma Delta,
Alpha Omicron Pi
Alpha Omicron Pi (, AOII, Alpha O) is an international women's fraternity founded on January 2, 1897, at Barnard College on the campus of Columbia University in New York City. The main archive URL iThe Baird's Manual Online Archive homepage
"AOI ...
,
Delta Delta Delta,
Alpha Pi Sigma,
Lambda Theta Alpha
Lambda Theta Alpha Latin Sorority, Inc. () is a Hispanic and Latino Americans, Latina-based sorority, established in 1975 at Kean University by seventeen women of Latin, Caribbean, and European descent as a support system for women in higher educat ...
,
Phi Mu,
Sigma Lambda Gamma,
Zeta Tau Alpha.
Notable alumni
See also
*
References
Informational notes
Citations
External links
*
Boise State Athletics website
{{authority control
Educational institutions established in 1932
Buildings and structures in Boise, Idaho
Universities and colleges accredited by the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities
Tourist attractions in Boise, Idaho
1932 establishments in Idaho
Public universities and colleges in Idaho