Of the 63 universities in the AAU, 35 are public schools in the United States. These colleges range across the country from six University of California campuses to the University at Buffalo in New York. Of the original 12 universities that made up the AAU in 1900, three were public institutions: UC-Berkeley, the University of Michigan and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The last college to join the AAU, the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2010, is a public university.
The AAU consists of 26 private universities in the United States. Nine of these colleges were original members of the AAU, including Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Yale and Princeton. The last private college to join the AAU was Emory University in 1995. Other private AAU institutions include Duke University, the University of Southern California and Vanderbilt.
In addition to 61 colleges across the United States, the AAU also has two members in Canada. McGill University and the University of Toronto joined the AAU in 1926. McGill is located in Montreal and was founded in 1821, making it the oldest college in the city. The University of Toronto is home to more than 57,000 undergraduate students (as of 2008-2009) and offers 841 undergraduate programs.
As of 2008, the colleges of the AAU consisted of more than 1 million undergraduate students. The students have earned more than 250,000 degrees, which makes up 16 percent of those awarded nationally. At AAU institutions, more than 26,000 doctorates have been handed out, which makes up 54 percent of those handed out in the nation. Additionally, 35 percent of Nobel Peace Prize winners were associated with the AAU universities. In 2008, AAU colleges received about $18 billion in federal research expenditures.