Drake University

Drake University is recognized as one of the finest institutions of higher learning in the Midwest. A midsized, private university in Des Moines, Iowa, we offer the benefits and resources of a larger institution along with the advantages of intimate class sizes and close personal relationships.

Our mission is to provide an exceptional learning environment that prepares students for meaningful personal lives, professional accomplishments, and responsible global citizenship.

At Drake, learning is active and interactive—something you do, not something that happens to you.As a student here, you will collaborate and communicate, complete ambitious projects, and connect ideas from the classroom with real problems and solutions in the world beyond campus.This is a powerful way to learn—pragmatic and goal-oriented. And it yields impressive results: Your Drake education will help you build the knowledge and skills to prepare for the path ahead, whatever future you choose.

Under the guidance of an experienced leadership team, we provide an exceptional learning environment that prepares students for meaningful personal lives, professional accomplishments, and responsible global citizenship. We do this by fostering collaborative learning among students, faculty, and staff and by integrating the liberal arts and sciences with professional preparation.

Drake enrolls more than 3,000 undergraduates and 1,800 graduate students from 45 states and more than 42 countries. These students choose from more than 70 majors, minors, and concentrations and 20 graduate degrees offered through six colleges and schools. In addition, we offer a range of continuing education programs serving working professionals, community members, and area businesses.

The Drake Curriculum provides the foundation for undergraduate education, ensuring exposure to a broad selection of areas of inquiry. Other hallmarks of a Drake education include the Honors Program, First-Year Seminars, and World Languages and Cultures. Students also have extensive opportunities to study abroad, complete internships, and take part in independent research.

Extracurricular highlights include more than 160 active student organizations and a thriving Division I athletics program.Among co-curricular opportunities, students take advantage of many options for developing leadership abilities and engaging in service-learning.The University sponsors an active program of research and outreach. Influential centers and institutes range from The Constitutional Law Center to The National Rehabilitation Institute, and the investigations of individual faculty span an equally broad spectrum.

Inspired by our school colors of blue and white, we have named Drake’s sustainability program “Blue is Green.” Through the program, we work to minimize Drake’s environmental impact in every way we can.

The Climate Action Plan, designed to lay out Drake's path to sustainability, was approved in the spring of 2013. The plan is part of The American College and University Presidents' Climate Commitment.

Drake’s environmental commitment starts in the classroom. Our Environmental Science and Policy Program teaches students about the connections between science, policy, economics, and society in order to find solutions for a sustainable world. In Drake’s Agricultural Law Center, faculty and students focus on issues such as soil and water conservation, renewable energy, land management, and organic farming.

Informing and energizing students is a key part of the sustainability program. The Drake Environmental Action League gets students involved in awareness-raising and outreach. The organization hosts Earth Week events, leads clean-ups of polluted streams, and much more. In another key effort, members of the Residence Hall Association are a leading force in promoting recycling.

Our goal is to achieve at least LEED Silver certification on all new campus construction. (LEED, or Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, represents one of the most widely recognized standards in the field of sustainable building.) In addition, the Facilities Services staff use green cleaning products that do not contain many of the toxins used in traditional cleaners, run all campus lawn mowers on bio-diesel, and time lawn sprinklers to run during periods of the day when evaporation is minimal.

Drake Dining purchases local foods when they are in-season, serves organic, free-trade coffee, and has eliminated trays for carrying food. This encourages diners to take only the food they will eat and saves on water and energy needed to clean trays.

Drake has been a leader in adopting single-stream recycling, making it easier for people across campus to recycle, since they don’t have to sort materials they are discarding. We also recycle our waste oil, collect and recycle refuse after athletic events, “demanufacture” old appliances, and operate a special machine to depressurize aerosol cans so that they can be recycled.

We are aiming to be a paperless university by 2015. Toward that effort we are already converting to electronic schedules and media guides in athletics, installing new LCD screens for menus and announcements, encouraging faculty to post handouts online, and issuing all University billing statements electronically.

To help members of the Drake community get around while keeping fuel use and vehicle exhaust to a minimum, we provide students and staff with free passes to ride the DART Bus system all over Des Moines and have invested in many bike racks around campus. In addition, our facilities team uses electric golf carts for cross-campus trips.

Drake students, faculty, and staff take full advantage of the wealth of cultural, recreational, and business opportunities found in Des Moines. In return, Drake enriches the city through its own cultural offerings, its considerable economic impact, and many endeavors in service-learning that channel the talent and energy of the Drake community toward meeting the needs of our neighbors.

For more than 130 years, Drake has been a place for forward-thinking leaders, and it all started with our founders: George T. Carpenter, a teacher and preacher with a fresh educational vision, and Francis Marion Drake, a Union general in the Civil War, a railroad magnate, and a governor of Iowa.Together they founded a university that expanded traditional study in theology and Classics to include science, law, and other fields. Coeducational from the start and welcoming students of all races, we enrolled our first international students within five years of our founding—welcoming arrivals from China, Persia, Armenia, and Japan.