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School data & stats
Outcomes
Cost
Community
Overview
Framingham State University traces its founding to 1839 as the first public normal school in the United States, backed by education reformer Horace Mann, and it still centers teacher preparation within a broader liberal-arts and professional curriculum today. It occupies a residential campus in a MetroWest Massachusetts city connected to Boston by commuter rail, giving students city access without Boston's cost or scale.
Academics
Education remains a signature program given the university's founding mission, and it has developed genuinely distinctive niches beyond that — food and nutrition and fashion design are both notably strong, unusual offerings for a public university of its size in New England. Business, communications, and the sciences round out a fairly comprehensive undergraduate catalog.
Campus & student life
The commuter-rail connection to Boston is a real asset — students can reach the city for internships, jobs, or entertainment while living on a smaller, quieter residential campus in Framingham itself. Campus life is modest in scale, without a big-time athletics culture, and many students balance coursework with jobs given the surrounding area's cost of living.
Worth knowing
The fashion design and food-and-nutrition programs are a genuine point of distinction — students interested in those fields find specialized coursework and facilities not typical of a regional public university this size.
Admissions
Deadlines (2026–27 cycle)
Applying
framingham.edu ↗High school coursework
Required4 years of English · 4 years of mathematics (Algebra I & II and Geometry or Trigonometry), including math senior year · 3 years of laboratory science (natural science, physical science, and/or technology/engineering) · 2 years of social sciences (including U.S. History) · 2 years of a single foreign language · 2 years of electives (17 college-preparatory courses total)
Your fit, with your own numbers
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