University of Puget Sound At A Glance

The university, as a community of learning, maintains a strong commitment to teaching excellence, scholarly engagement, and fruitful student-faculty interaction.

The mission of the university is to develop in its students capacities for critical analysis, aesthetic appreciation, sound judgment, and apt expression that will sustain a lifetime of intellectual curiosity, active inquiry, and reasoned independence. A Puget Sound education, both academic and cocurricular, encourages a rich knowledge of self and others; an appreciation of commonality and difference; the full, open, and civil discussion of ideas; thoughtful moral discourse; and the integration of learning, preparing the university’s graduates to meet the highest tests of democratic citizenship. Such an education seeks to liberate each person’s fullest intellectual and human potential to assist in the unfolding of creative and useful lives.

University of Puget Sound has earned a national reputation for excellent academics and its commitment to experiential learning, and is known for its PacRim Program, an international study opportunity for students that draws on faculty expertise in Asian Studies. The university also is one of the top schools in the country in placing students, especially women, into graduate schools in the physical and natural sciences. And Puget Sound is regularly recognized as a top producer of Fulbright awards for students, and Puget Sound students annually are awarded highly-competitive post-graduate fellowships.

Puget Sound students come from 46 states and territories and 8 countries are represented. Nearly twenty-five percent of undergraduates identify as students of color and about one-third of students are the first in their families to attend college. Students choose from more than 1,200 courses in 50 areas of traditional and interdisciplinary areas of study, with a student-faculty ratio of 11:1 and an average class size of 17 students.

Puget Sound faculty are recognized among the “Best Undergraduate Teaching Programs” for national liberal arts colleges by U.S. News & World Report (2022).

Located in a vibrant port city in the Pacific Northwest, Puget Sound is a leading national liberal arts and sciences university preparing students for success since 1888. In an ever-evolving world, the University of Puget Sound believes that the best preparation for the future is an education that exposes students to multiple perspectives, engages students in work that makes a difference in the world, and helps students discover who they are and what they have to offer. It’s an education that transcends boundaries, teaches students to adapt to changing circumstances, and prepare for careers that might not yet exist.

The university’s beautiful 97-acre campus supports connections with the world it serves, from the tide flats and urban energy of the entrepreneurial city of Tacoma, Washington to nearby Seattle, the Pacific Rim and beyond. A Puget Sound education is rooted in an inspiring confluence of histories and cultures and ideas, and centered on undergraduate and graduate students who are open-minded, outward-reaching, and actively put their educations to work.