Southern Illinois University Edwardsville (SIUE) is a public university in Edwardsville, Illinois. SIUE was established in 1957 as an extension of Southern Illinois University Carbondale. It is the younger of the two major institutions of Southern Illinois University system, and, as of 2018, has the larger enrollment. The university offers graduate programs through its Graduate School. The majority of SIUE's students are from Illinois, with out-of-state and international students accounting for 19% of enrollment. SIUE does offer in-state tuition for undergraduate students from all 50 states. The university offers numerous extracurricular activities to its students, including athletics, honor societies, student clubs and organizations, as well as fraternities and sororities. The university has more than 115,000 alumni. Fielding athletic teams known as the SIU Edwardsville Cougars, the university participates in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) at the Division I level as a member of Ohio Valley Conference (OVC). History During the post–World War II economic expansion, a lack of public higher education was noticeable in the growing Metro-East area. Organizations from across the area took it upon themselves to relieve this lack. Southern Illinois University (SIU), over to the region's south, opened a residence center in Belleville in 1949. In 1955, the Edwardsville Chamber of Commerce founded the Southwestern Illinois Council for Higher Education (SWICHE), tasked with creating a more permanent solution to the problem. SWICHE and the SIU Board of Trustees met and stated their agreement in goals in 1956, and, that same year, an Executive Committee from the Board of Education in Alton invited Dr. Alonzo Myers, Chairman of the Department of Higher Education for Higher Education at New York University, to perform a study of the need for higher education in the Metro-East. Dr. Myers's 1957 report, The Extent and the Nature of Needs for Higher Education in Madison and St. Clair Counties, outlined the precise need: the 1950 census showed that students in the region in question were only half as likely as those in other regions of the country to finish a four-year college degree program (owing specifically to the lack of a nearby university and the financial difficulties of going to school away from home at other state universities). Businesses in the area were in need of college-trained employees, but were forced to hire outside of the area, especially in the fields of business administration, nursing, education, and industrial technology. Myers concluded that, rather