EARTH University
university in Costa Rica
EARTH University (Universidad EARTH, Escuela de Agricultura de la Región Tropical Húmeda) is a private, non-profit university that offers one program of study: an undergraduate licenciatura degree in agricultural sciences. The university invests in students – predominantly from Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa – working to become leaders of positive socio-economic and environmental change for their home countries and the world at large through a techno-scientific education emphasizing Social entrepreneurship
History
In the 1980s, EARTH University was developed through a partnership between a group of Costa Ricans, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the Costa Rican Government.
The cornerstone of the first campus building was laid on 2 April 1989 and after years of fundraising, campus planning and curriculum development, the first class was inaugurated on March 26, 1990. The first graduation ceremony was held in December 1993.
Admissions and student body
Currently, EARTH has about 400 students enrolled from 41 different countries. 51 percent of the student body is women and 81 percent is from rural communities. Each enrolling class comprises about 100 students chosen from about 1,300 applicants. Most students receive scholarships to cover all or part of the $29,000 tuition.
Campus
The 52,981 m2 (570,280 sq ft) campus on a 33.76 km2 (8,340 acres) property in Guácimo includes educational facilities, a library specializing in agricultural and environmental topics, laboratories, a rainforest reserve with primary and secondary forests, and a farm dedicated to agricultural and cattle production. The second campus, EARTH-La Flor, was donated to the university in 2005 by the family of Daniel Oduber Quirós, a previous president of Costa Rica.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “EARTH University” as university in Costa Rica. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as university in Costa Rica. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5322516. VIAF identifies the subject as 124798083. The Library of Congress control number is nr2005015830. Authority coordinates are 10.220, -83.592. 4 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1989, 1990, 1993 and 2005.
Official terminology may obscure informal participation, dissent or communities documented only indirectly. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.
- Event chronology
- Institutional context
- Locating named record creators
Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “EARTH University”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow EARTH University primary sources, EARTH University archive and EARTH research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “EARTH University”?
- Who created the surviving record, and for what administrative purpose?
- Which voices are present, absent or mediated by the institution?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “EARTH University” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.