WORLD'S (UNOFFICIAL) LARGEST ONLINE CATALOG OF PHOTOGRAPHS TAKEN OF U.S. FOUR-YEAR COLLEGE NAME SIGNS

   NCAA Division I-A (FCS: Football Bowl Subdivision) has 128 schools in 11 conferences (including the Power Five conferences).
   In 2024 NCAA Division I had6247 schools in 32 conferences (and includes the above FCS schools). All are accounted for in this webpage. Which schools are in Division I continually changes over time.

THE PROJECT: This originally was a seven-year project (minus the year of 2020 for COVID) starting in 2014 to photograph signs on the campuses of over 450 U.S. four-year colleges and universities (no two-year schools). Most are colleges and universities in the NCAA Division I (but some other smaller four-year schools are included). This project took about 120,000 highway miles driven in over 2,000 hours. That includes three days of driving over 900 miles! To prove I did this, I kept travel logs (odometer readings, times and costs), have receipts plus photos of things along the way other than the college signs. Guaranteed I personally visited every one of these college campuses.

THE START: Several people asked which college was first or how I got started on this Quest. Simple to determine – look back at my photos to see which has the earliest date. The Winner: University of New Mexico in 2004. In 2007 while in California I wanted to photograph Stanford and Berkeley but was unable to make it to those towns. In 2009, while in the Northwest (at the time I was in Year #2 of my photograph-state-capitol-buildings project), I photographed buildings (but no signs) on campuses in Montana and Idaho. Then, in 2010, I photographed buildings (again, no signs) at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. This sort of launched it because I decided I wanted to visit/photograph the other seven Ivy League schools. In 2012 I photographed buildings at Yale University, an Ivy League school. In 2013, while in Salt Lake City for the state capitol building, I photographed the campus signs of Utah University and nearby BYU. Later that year, while in Chicago, I photographed buildings at Northwestern. In spring of 2014, I photographed buildings on the campuses of the University of Florida and Florida State University along with several Texas campuses. So after visiting two dozen campuses in ten years, just three actual campus signs were photographed! In the summer of 2014, I began to actually photograph a campus sign for each school visited, this time, in Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee and South Carolina. This finally got the project started in earnest, if inefficiently. I had to go back to all those previous campuses to photograph their actual signs. Lesson learned. There were two more lessons yet to be learned. One, before visiting a campus, locate the signs instead of wandering around the campuses. The other lesson learned was setting the scope for the project -- which schools should be included. By the time I decided that in late 2017, I had already been to, or through, many towns where other colleges are. So, back to them as well. If in 2004 I thought all of this through, I could have saved myself hundreds of traveling hours.

GPS COORDINATES: The GPS coordinates for all known campus signs are listed per school. However, the photograph of only one sign is shown. Undoubtedly some campus signs were missed but most of the known signs were also photographed.

VISITED or UNVISITED (and placeholders): Until an actual on-site photograph is taken of each sign, a placeholder is given below to give an idea of what their signs actually look like and are indicated with '(to photo)'. Signs actually photographed by me are marked with '{photographed}'.

SIGN ACCESSIBILITY: Many signs are in tough-to-get-near-to-photograph. In some cases I had to drive around the block and pause just long enough to take a photograph from the car.

SIGNS CHANGING: Over time, schools add new signs in new locations as the campus buildings change (which seems to be constant on many campuses), and, update or even remove existing signs. In fact, in a few cases, signs I found with Google Street View were gone when I arrived on campus. Thus, presumably, in a few years, some of the signs on this page may no longer be there.

NO CAMPUS SIGN: Amazingly, some schools reported that they do not have an actual sign with their name on it (but some said they have some unique iconic or defining item on campus). And for some schools that failed to respond to inquiries, the determination has yet to be made whether they have a sign and if so then where on campus is it.

ON TO 500: In 2022, after I thought I had finished this project, I decided to go ahead and get a few dozen more to put the campus count over 500. Still sticking with four-year schools (i.e. no two-year community colleges) but they were whichever campuses were somewhere along my trip routes.

Observations from this Project:
1. When searching the web for contact information for about half of schools photographed, very few made it obvious or easy to send in a general question such as 'where is the sign located?'. Some had an online form to fill out including some that asked for all kinds of personal information. It seems the contact pages are for getting prospective students. Understandable. Some universities I just had to pick the closest guess or anyone. Some general departments that were quite helpful included: student services, security, public relations or media, student government, and, alumni. a BIG THANK YOU to all of those who guided me to the right places.
2. Interestingly, most colleges/universities have streets named "University" and/or" College" and/or" Campus" and/or" Stadium" and/or" Alumni". However, only Colorado State University (Thanks CSU!) has a street sign on a single pole where Avenues 'University' and 'College' intersect.HERE (Thanks Colorado State!) is the only one I could find where those two streets intersect, AND, a single sign has them both (some schools have the two streets intersecting but put the street names on the overhanging traffic light pole arms). Of course, every town has a 'Main Street'. Seems like almost every town also has a street named for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
3. It seems that some universities believe that it is more important to have signs with the name of the facility (often named after someone) than to have signs with the school name.

best looking sign: The sign that I think is the best looking one: Florida Atlantic University.

ORDERING OF SIGNS: The order is, first, alphabetical by state abbreviation name, then, alphabetical by city name within state. Then, in the case where a city has more than one school, the school names are alphabeticized.

     
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