Rutgers University
Multi-campus American public research university in New Jersey, United States
Influence Rankings by Discipline
How’s this school influential?
Influential People
Who are Rutgers University's Most influential alumni?
Rutgers University's most influential alumni faculty include professors and professionals in the fields of Criminal Justice, Economics, and Sociology. Rutgers University’s most academically influential people include Milton Friedman, Toni Morrison, and Philip Roth.
About This School
How does this school stack up?
Rutgers University’s full official name is Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.
Rutgers traces its roots to Queen’s College, which was founded in 1766, making it the thirteenth-oldest university in the US.
In 1825, Revolutionary War hero and philanthropist Henry Rutgers made a large financial contribution to the school, which in turn changed its name to Rutgers College.
Rutgers College was upgraded to full university status in 1924, and in 1945 Rutgers was officially designated The State University of New Jersey.
Today, Rutgers comprises three main campuses (New Brunswick-Piscataway—the flagship campus—Newark, and Camden), with over 4000 faculty members spread across 175 academic departments and a total student body approaching 70,000.
Rutgers is associated with six Nobel Prize laureates, namely:
- Physicist, Heinrich Rohrer
- Microbiologist, Selman Waksman
- Economists, Milton Friedman & Harry Markowitz
- Dominican poet, Derek Walcott
- American novelist, Toni Morrison
Among other prominent Rutgers-connected people, we may note the following:
- Singer, actor, and civil rights activist, Paul Robeson
- Popular musician, David Bryan
- Painter and sculptor, George Segal
- Poets, Joyce Kilmer & Robert Pinsky
- Novelists, Philip Roth, Junot Díaz & Janet Evanovich
- Film director, Henry Selick
- Actors, James Gandolfini, Roy Scheider, Calista Flockhart, Charles Hallahan & Keir Dullea
- Historian, David Levering Lewis
- Linguist, John McWhorter
- Philosophers, Jerry Fodor, Zenon Pylyshyn, Stephen Stich & Jonathan Schaffer
- Philosopher, computer scientist, and Turing Award winner, Judea Pearl
- Physicist, Michael R. Douglas
- Evolutionary biology, Robert Trivers
- Former FBI Director, Louis J. Freeh
- US Supreme Court Justice, Ruth Bader Ginsberg
- US Senator and 2020 Democratic Party presidential nomination candidate, Elizabeth Warren