Northern Arizona University: an R1 public university in Flagstaff, Arizona

Northern Arizona University (NAU) is a public university based in Flagstaff, Arizona. Founded in 1899 as a teachers' college, it now offers more than 450 degrees and programmes.

Location and setting

The main campus sits in Flagstaff, a university town in the American Southwest at the base of the San Francisco Peaks. It is the kind of city whose life revolves around the campus: moderate in size, generally cheaper to live in than the large coastal metros, and small enough that international students are not lost in the crowd.

Arizona borders California, Nevada, Utah and New Mexico, and meets Colorado at the Four Corners point — a convenient base for travel across the western states.

What the R1 classification means

NAU is classified by the Carnegie Classification as R1: Very High Research Spending and Doctorate Production, the highest tier in that system. The criteria concern research and development expenditure together with the number of research doctorates awarded each year.

For an undergraduate, that means something more concrete than a ranking line: R1 institutions typically run laboratories, hold research funding, and offer the chance to join faculty projects in the early years — which is not true everywhere.

Points worth noting

• More than 125 years of operation, and one of Arizona's three public universities.
• Small class sizes, which raises the amount of direct contact with faculty.
• A teaching approach built around student experience and applied skills.

Notable fields of study

• Business
• Computer Science
• Engineering
• Nursing
• Education
• Psychology
• Environmental Science
• Forestry & Sustainability

The forestry, environment and sustainability cluster is tied to where the university sits: Flagstaff lies within a large ponderosa pine forest, so fieldwork for those programmes is on the doorstep.

Indicative tuition for 2026–2027

• Undergraduate: approximately US$31,600 – 32,800 a year.
• Postgraduate: approximately US$25,000 – 35,000 a year.

These are indicative figures. Actual tuition varies by programme and by the number of credits taken each term, and excludes living costs, health insurance and other mandatory university fees.

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