About AUP

You’re looking for a place. Ideally, it would be in a city bursting at the seams with culture, art, and opportunities. You’d like a vibrant learning community, built on a strong academic foundation that would cultivate your critical thinking skills and reveal the links between diverse disciplines. Upon leaving, you’d be ready to meet the needs of a globalized world and would have access to a thriving network of extraordinary alumni in a variety of fields. You’re looking for this place. We think you’ve found it.

The American University of Paris does more than provide an American-style university education in Paris. Our global liberal arts heritage drives us to offer an academic experience that inspires over 1200 students, representing a record 110 nationalities and 65 languages, to cross cultural, national, ethnic, religious and linguistic boundaries in the AUP classroom and beyond. Our faculty of 35 nationalities uses its research and practice to fuel thought-provoking conversations in intimate and collaborative classroom settings, where you will explore different academic disciplines from a variety of perspectives. You will be given every opportunity to connect your learning to professional and real-life settings in Paris and beyond, with a global liberal arts education that will help lead you to a fulfilling career or further study around the world.

As an AUP global explorer, you epitomize AUP’s commitment to a world of interdependence through your passion for change, your determination to build bridges among far-flung communities, your leadership of extracurricular organizations, and your interest in our international opportunities for scholarships, volunteering, and internships. We are committed to leveraging our extensive university relationships and resources, including our worldwide alumni network, to help our students open the doors to their futures and to succeed in today’s globalized world.

AUP’s 20,000 alumni are currently living and working in 145 countries around the globe. Their stories demonstrate the impact of an AUP education. We expect that you, like our graduates, who often pursue their work in languages and cultures not their own, will go on to a successful career or further study around the world. 

From AUP's historic beginning in rented classrooms of the American Church of Paris and the vow of our founder to "transcend the bounds of narrow nationalisms," to today's explicit intention to provide our global explorer students with the academic, interpersonal and pre-professional preparation needed to confront contemporary global realities, our mission has not wavered.

AUP Mission Statement

Chartered as a liberal arts college in 1962, The American University of Paris is today an urban, independent, international university located at the meeting point of France, Europe, and the world. The University provides a student-centered, academically-rigorous, career-enabling, and transformative learning experience to the global explorers who are its Bachelor’s and Master’s students, empowering them to cross both disciplinary and cultural borders with ease in order to assume their places as responsible actors and leaders in over 140 countries worldwide.

AUP’s mission is to educate its graduates to communicate effectively in a world of many languages; to read well, listen carefully, and write intelligently in a voice of their own; to become critical thinkers about history and human societies, economics, culture, literature, the arts, science, politics, psychology, business, and communication; to develop creative interdisciplinary solutions to contemporary global challenges; to be digitally literate in a world of swift-paced change; to understand the ethical imperatives of living in such a world; and to move across contemporary cultural borders with a sense of commitment to and responsibility for a world held in common.

The University achieves its mission by providing its students with a curriculum combining liberal arts inquiry, preparation for professional life, and student-centered, active learning in small classroom settings; dynamic, engaged teaching informed by both disciplinary and interdisciplinary faculty scholarship; a host of opportunities for direct experience of the world and its many cultures; a wealth of intellectual exchanges on campus at conferences of global reach; and an integrated learning model that marries classroom learning and its application to real-world contexts, preparing students to master and to make, to reflect and to apply, to analyze and to act. In these ways, an AUP education supports professional skills development and cultural fluency—the sense of global engagement and the capacity to negotiate difference that emerge from the natural diversity of AUP’s student and faculty bodies. Upon graduation, AUP students take part in and benefit from the global network that is our worldwide alumni community, creating lifelong connections to one another and to the University.