University of Sioux Falls
private college in Sioux Falls, South Dakota
The University of Sioux Falls (USF) is a private university in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, United States, affiliated with the American Baptist Churches USA. In fall 2014, the university enrolled a total of 1,142 undergraduate students and 311 graduate students.
History
Founding and early history
On June 5, 1872, pastors and delegates of nine Baptist churches in the Dakota Territory gathered in Vermillion, South Dakota, at the first meeting of the Baptist Association. They adopted the following resolution: Be it resolved that we take immediate steps for the establishment of an institution among us and that we devote a suitable portion of time at each annual meeting of the consideration of this important subject and give our individual associated influence to encourage a more general and complete education of our youth under distinctly Christian influence.
Under the name of Dakota Collegiate Institute, secondary and collegiate programs began on September 8, 1883. The institution's name changed to Sioux Falls University in 1885, with the secondary program called the academy and the collegiate department branded Sioux Falls College. Although the college grew, the academy's enrollment declined, forcing it to close in 1925.
Between 1929 and 1931, Sioux Falls College acquired four Baptist schools that had ceased to operate: Des Moines University, Des Moines, Iowa; Grand Island College, Grand Island, Nebraska; Cedar Valley Seminary, Osage, Iowa; and Parker College, Winnebago, Minnesota. With the 1931 merger of Grand Island College with what was still legally Sioux Falls University, the institution's official name became Sioux Falls College.
During the Second World War, the college lost its accreditation and offered 200 students, mainly women, two-year degrees. Enrollment surged when the veterans returned home, only to lapse to meager numbers two years later.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “University of Sioux Falls” is private college in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through University, Sioux and Falls, not as a finished interpretation.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7896307. VIAF identifies the subject as 143264464. The Library of Congress control number is n2002163505. Authority coordinates are 43.531, -96.739. None of the 5 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2014, 1872, 1883 and 1885.
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This entry incorporates text from “University of Sioux Falls” 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.