STANFORD UNIVERSITY

A rival of Yale, Cambridge, Harvard and MIT for the quality of its curriculum, the university also boasts an enchanting climate and setting, with 3,200 hectares of palm-fringed parkland, 19 libraries, a nautical stadium and a golf course. It's a great place to live and study all year round. However, the very high tuition fees naturally reserve this little paradise for a minority of students, especially as the school has become the most selective in the country, with an admission rate of just 5.2% in 2020.

Most of Silicon Valley's geniuses come out of Stanford. More than 300 companies based in the region have been founded and are currently run by Stanford alumni. A typical example of this success story: in 1938, two students named Hewlett and Packard, on the advice of their professor Frederick Terman, founded their first electronics company after designing an electronic audio-oscillator in a Palo Alto garage. Today, Hewlett-Packard's Palo Alto headquarters employs 5,000 people. Their former garage, located at 367 Addison Avenue behind a private home, is considered the birthplace of Silicon Valley. A plaque reads "The birthplace of Silicon Valley". The university's alumni also include many business leaders: Steve Ballmer, founder and former CEO of Microsoft, Philip Knight, founder of Nike, David Filo and Jerry Yang, founders of Yahoo, as well as the founders of LinkedIn, Instagram, Snapchat... The list goes on. However, the most famous success story attached to Stanford remains that of the founders of Google (Sergey Brin and Larry Page), who were still students when they founded their company in the late 1990s. Sports and film celebrities such as Reese Witherspoon, Jennifer Connelly and Tiger Woods have also graduated from Stanford. Among its professors and researchers, the university counts 15 Nobel Prize winners.

In 2019, Stanford is ranked as the world's second largest university, behind MIT and ahead of Harvard.

Take a tour. Spanning 32 ^km2, the campus is home to numerous points of interest, including the Rodin Sculpture Garden, an art museum, the Arizona Cactus Garden, the Stanford Memorial Church, the Hoover Tower and Frank Lloyd Wright's Hanna-Honeycomb House. Guided tours of the campus are regularly organized. Visit the website for more information.