Kansas State ranks first in the nation among public universities in its total of Rhodes, Marshall, Truman, Goldwater, and Udall scholars since 1986. It ranks seventh in the nation overall—behind Harvard and Princeton, but ahead of Dartmouth and MIT.
Too cool for a state school? In 2000, K-State broke into Kaplan Enterprise’s “Top Ten Trendiest Universities” in the country, elbowing Stanford off the list. Seventeen magazine seconded the motion in 2002, tagging KSU as one of “America’s 100 Coolest Colleges.”
Mens sana in corpore sano? Muscle & Fitness magazine ranked K-State among the 20 fittest colleges of 2005.
From gas to gin, Rusty’s Last Chance Saloon, which began life as a gas station in the late 1920s, is aging gracefully. In 2000, it was designated as one of the top 100 college bars in the nation.
K-Straight no more. Despite a long-standing reputation as the more sexually orthodox of Kansas’s two major public schools, KSU found itself featured in Out magazine’s “2005 Gay College Guide.” Its appearance was due to the college’s recently established chapter of Delta Lambda Phi, a nationally recognized fraternity for “gay, bisexual, and progressive gentlemen.”
Nuclear winter (and summer, spring, and fall)? Kansas State is one of only 25 universities in the country to boast a fully-functional nuclear reactor on campus.