College of San Mateo
community college in San Mateo, California, United States
College of San Mateo (CSM) is a public community college in San Mateo, California. It is part of the San Mateo County Community College District. College of San Mateo is located at the northern corridor of Silicon Valley and situated on a 153-acre site in the San Mateo hills. The college currently serves approximately 15,000 day, evening and weekend students. The college offers 69 A.A./A.S. degree majors and 81 certificate programs.
History
William L. Glascock, the principal of San Mateo High School, first proposed a junior college for San Mateo in the early 1920s as an alternative to the traditional four-year college. Tuition at four-year institutions cost up to US$1,000 (equivalent to $19,000 in 2025) per year at the time; at the junior college, students could instead live at home while earning credit equivalent to the freshman and sophomore years of a four-year school. The college was initially founded as the San Mateo Junior College (SMJC) after being approved by voters on March 31, 1922. The first classes started on August 22 of that year in a building shared with San Mateo High School. The first registered student was Marjorie Brace, who could not attend Stanford because of the high cost of tuition.
“College of San Mateo” enters the record as community college in San Mateo, California, United States. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what College, Mateo and community can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q18409139. VIAF identifies the subject as 146670509. The Library of Congress control number is n86848693. Authority coordinates are 37.536, -122.336. 4 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2025 and 1922.
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This entry incorporates text from “College of San Mateo” 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.