The College of Journalism and Communications is part of the University of Florida, which is the flagship university for the State of Florida, the nation's third most populous state. UF is ranked 7th among the nation's top public research universities by U.S News and World Report. Located in Gainesville since 1906, UF has 16 colleges, a major academic health center, a championship-winning athletic program, a top-ranked undergraduate online program and, in keeping with its land-grant mission, one of the nation's most comprehensive agriculture and natural resources programs. All are based at the university's 2,000-acre campus, joining its historic red-brick core with advanced facilities and preserved natural areas, and connecting to adjacent innovation, commercial and residential districts.
UF has 56,000 students, 31,000 employees, 5,500 faculty members, a $5 billion annual budget and more than 140 mission-focused units across the state of Florida. It is the Sunshine State's only member of the Association of American Universities comprising the nation's 60 leading public and private research universities. In addition to its U.S. News ranking, UF is ranked 2nd in Kiplinger's Best College Values and 6th in The New York Times College Access Index. UF has 45 elections to the National Academies and American Academy of Arts and Sciences; 51 fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science; and two Pulitzer Prize winners. Nearly 50,000 students applied as freshmen for the 2020-21 academic year, a new record. Twenty percent of the 6,600 students who have committed to attend are first-generation; 29 percent are black, Hispanic or Native American.
Several qualities distinguish UF among today's leading public research universities. The first is its highly comprehensive breadth on a single campus, facilitating interdisciplinary collaboration among, for example, faculty within the adjacent colleges of journalism, engineering and medicine. The second is its unwavering support from the State of Florida, which has endorsed UF's drive to become one of the nation's very best public research universities – supporting those effort since 2013 with hundreds of millions of dollars in additional funding to grow its faculty ranks by 500 faculty. UF's third exceptional quality is its dynamism. Like the state of Florida, now the nation's third-largest and among its fastest-growing, UF is undergoing rapid transformation as it pursues its overarching aspiration "to be a premier university that the state, nation and world look to for leadership."