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A hundred years ago in Orange County, fewer than 6,000 students were attending classes in 39 elementary and three high schools. How things have changed.

Today, there are over 60 high school campuses alone and enough elementary schools to educate half a million students. Education, on all levels, flourishes here as evidenced by the fact that a dozen high schools in the County were 19999 winners in the California Distinguished Schools Program, while nine elementary schools were nominated for national recognition as 1999 Nation Blue Ribbon Schools by the U.S. Department of Education.

Orange County also boasts two large state universities, California State University, Fullerton, which opened in 1960, and The University of California, Irvine, which, although among the youngest campuses in the UC system, is also one of the fastest growing in stature and size. According to Clark Kerr, President of the University of California from 1957 to 1967, "UCI has been one of the great academic rockets launched in the post-World War II period of American history."

In 1995, UCI became the first public university whose faculty won two Nobel Prizes in two different fields in the same year - Frederick Reines in physics and F. Sherwood Rowland in chemistry. That same year, the Nation Research Council ranked UCI's doctoral programs in the top 10 in the nation among public universities. The campus is additionally enriched by the UCI Graduate School of Management, dedicated to developing and educating students to become business leaders through full or part time MBA degree programs and non-degree executive education programs. These programs translate into two to three thousand highly skilled upper-echelon business leaders ready for immediate placement every year.

Besides the area's outstanding state schools, there are also several private colleges such as Chapman University in Orange, comprised of eight schools and colleges including a school of film and television creaed in 1996, and a school of law which opened in 1995.

There are also four community college districts in Orange County with nine colleges. These include 50 year old Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa, which ranks second of all California's 106 two-year institutions in the number of students it transfers to the University of California and California State University systems, as well as prominent institutions like Saddleback, Golden West, and Irvine Valley.