A - Z Index • Directories •

• About Cal Poly
• Giving to Cal Poly
• Colleges & Programs
• Research
• News
• Events

 

Loren Roberts

Kathy Sabine

Laura Diaz

Rick Sturckow

Robert "Hoot" Gibson

Mike Krukow

John Madden

Lisa Satriano

Home > Simply the Best

Cal Poly is Simply the Best! A few of the reasons:

Cal Poly Grads Get Jobs!

A Cal Poly education pays off. For the past decade, 92 to 96 percent of Cal Poly students report working full-time or attending graduate school within one year of graduation. A full 94 percent of 2004-05 grads are working full-time or attending graduate school -- 73 percent are working full time, and 21 percent went on to graduate school. And 92 percent of those employed are in fields relating to their college degrees.

According to data on our 2004-2005 graduates, the most recent group surveyed, within one year of graduation:

Read more about our graduate statistics

The median starting salary for 2004-05 grads was $45,000 a year. Grads from the College of Engineering led the way with a median starting salary of $55,000, followed by grads from the Orfalea College of Business with a median starting salary of $45,000 and grads from the College of Architecture and Environmental Design with a median starting salary of $43,900.

Cal Poly graduates are in high demand in the job market. A full 60 percent of the grads of 2004-05 had job offers before graduation. Within three months of graduation, 83 percent of the grads of '04-05 had jobs; by 6 months after graduation, 95 percent were employed.

Hundreds of firms recruit and employ Cal Poly graduates each year. Depending on the status of the national economy, Cal Poly hosts from 300 to 600 different employers each year through its on-campus recruiting program and job fair events, including Adobe, Deloitte & Touche, Gallo, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft...see our more complete list of employers.

back to top

Cal Poly Students Are the Cream of the Crop

Cal Poly's admissions process is a highly competitive one. Fall 2007 was the thirteenth straight year the university experienced a record applicant pool: over 34,000 applications for 4,700 available spaces. Freshmen enrolled for the Fall 2007 term had an average high school GPA of 3.71, average ACT score of 25 and average SAT score of 1183.

A Decade of Excellence:
Average GPA, *SAT1, and ACT scores of Incoming Cal Poly Freshmen

	1998	1999	2000	2001	2002	2003	2004	2005	2006	2007
GPA	3.67	3.70	3.72	3.70	3.80	3.73	3.77	3.73	3.70	3.71
*SAT1	1164	1162	1165	1169	1219	1196	1213	1203	1195	1183
ACT	26	26	26	26	28	27	27	27	26	25

*SAT1: reading and math only

back to top

Nationally Known

For the 16th year in a row, Cal Poly has been rated the best public-master's university in the West by U.S. News & World Report, in its 2009 America's Best Colleges guidebook.

This year, Cal Poly’s College of Engineering was named the No. 1 public engineering program in the nation in the magazine's Best Undergraduate Engineering Programs - for schools whose highest degree is a bachelor's or master's.

A number of College of Engineering programs also ranked high in the Best Undergraduate Engineering Programs in their individual specialty categories. Cal Poly's industrial/manufacturing program was named the No. 1 program in the nation. The university’s civil, computer electrical and mechanical engineering programs were each ranked as the top program at a public university in their respective specialty categories. Cal Poly’s aerospace program was ranked the third best program at a public university.

In 2008, Cal Poly's architecture program was rated as the No. 4 architecture school in the nation by the leading architecture and engineering journal DesignIntelligence.

Cal Poly's Sustainable Environments program won top national honors this year for "ecological literacy" from the American Institute of Architects.

Cal Poly’s College of Agriculture, Food and Environmental Sciences, the fourth largest undergraduate agricultural program in the nation, consistently rated in the top five agricultural programs in the nation for baccalaureate degrees conferred on minorities.

The Cal Poly Rodeo Team took top honors at the 2005 National Intercollegiate Rodeo Association championships, earning both the men's and women's All Around champion spots at the national finals.

Cal Poly’s Orfalea College of Business MBA team placed fifth at the 41st annual International Collegiate Business Strategy Competition this year.

Cal Poly is again among the "Top 100" universities in the nation in awarding degrees to minority students, according to rankings in Black Issues in Higher Education magazine, which compiles a national list of colleges and universities that confer the most bachelor's degrees on minority students based on data from the U.S. Department of Education.

 

 

 

back to top

Cal Poly Alumni Shine

Cal Poly now has more than 117,000 alumni living and working everywhere from New York to Washington D.C. to Wisconsin to Idaho to Hawaii to Hong Kong. Geographically, San Luis Obispo County has the largest concentration of Cal Poly alumni (14,479), followed by Santa Clara County (8,480) and Los Angeles County (8,454).

Prominent Cal Poly alumni include:

Cal Poly Alumni in Government

Cal Poly Alumni in Athletics

A Few Alumni comments about Cal Poly:

"Cal Poly emphasizes educating the mind and learning by doing. Both are invaluable to architects, enabling us both to design and build."

Kenneth Rodriguez
Class of 1976

CP Home • CP Find It Get Adobe Reader • Microsoft Viewers

Contact Us • About this Website

Last Update: 12/12/2008

California Polytechnic State University
San Luis Obispo, CA 93407
(805) 756-1111
© 2008 California Polytechnic State University. All rights reserved