San Francisco State University (commonly referred to as San Francisco State, SF State and SFSU) is a public research university located in San Francisco, California, United States.

As part of the 23-campus California State University system, the university offers 118 different Bachelor's degrees, 94 Master's degrees, 5 Doctoral degrees including two Doctor of Education, a Doctor of Physical Therapy, a Ph.D in Education and Doctor of Physical Therapy Science, along with 26 teaching credentials among six academic colleges.

Service-learning is an educational approach that combines learning objectives with community service in order to provide a pragmatic, progressive learning experience while meeting societal needs.

A graduate school (sometimes shortened as grad school) is a school that awards advanced academic degrees (i.e. master's and doctoral degrees) with the general requirement that students must have earned a previous undergraduate (bachelor's) degree with a high grade point average.

A distinction is typically made between graduate schools (where courses of study vary in the degree to which they provide training for a particular profession) and professional schools, which offer specialized advanced degrees in professional fields such as medicine, nursing, business, engineering, or law.

The distinction between graduate schools and professional schools is not absolute, as various professional schools offer graduate degrees (e.g., some nursing schools offer a master's degree in nursing).

Also, some graduate degrees train students for a specific profession (e.g. an MSc or a PhD in epidemiology trains a person to be an epidemiologist).

Undergraduate education is the post-secondary education previous to the postgraduate education.

It includes all the academic programs up to the level of a bachelor's degree.

For example, in the United States an entry level university student is known as an undergraduate, while students of higher degrees are known as graduates.

In some other educational systems and subjects, undergraduate education is post-secondary education up to the level of a master's degree; this is the case for some science courses in Britain and some medicine courses in Europe.

Social class (or, simply, class), as in class society, is a set of concepts in the social sciences and political theory centered on models of social stratification in which people are grouped into a set of hierarchical social categories, the most common being the upper, middle, and lower classes.