What it means
ASU is Arizona State University, and in Scottsdale the three letters do a lot of work. It is the school four miles south where a surprising number of your neighbors went, the employer of a surprising number of the rest, and the reason the south end of the city has a research park with a giant white shade sail on it. It is also the maroon-and-gold tide that rolls up Scottsdale Road on home football Saturdays and parks itself in Old Town bars.
You will hear it in three registers. “She’s at ASU” means a student, almost always on the Tempe campus. “ASU’s playing” means the Sun Devils, the teams, and the speaker expects you to know the opponent. And “down by ASU” is a direction: the Tempe side of the river, the Mill Avenue bars, the stadium. Scottsdale’s own piece of the university is SkySong, the ASU Scottsdale Innovation Center at Scottsdale and McDowell Roads, which has its own lexicon entry at SkySong and sits on the ground the old Los Arcos Mall occupied until 1999.
Where you’ll meet it
In South Scottsdale, where SkySong anchors McDowell Road. In Old Town on game nights. In the Phoenix Open gallery at the 16th hole, which draws its loudest fans from Tempe. On every résumé and softball-league roster in the Valley.
Where the word came from
The letters are young; the school is old. The 13th Arizona Territorial Legislature created the Territorial Normal School at Tempe on March 12, 1885, in the 1880s territory, a teacher-training academy for a territory that had almost no teachers. Classes began on February 8, 1886, with 33 students in a four-room building on land donated by Tempe farmers. “Normal” in that sense, a school that set the norms for teaching, is why old-timers still call the early teams the Normals.
Then came the renamings, six of them: Tempe Normal School of Arizona in 1889, Tempe Normal School in 1903, Tempe State Teachers College in 1925, Arizona State Teachers College in 1929, Arizona State College in 1945. Each step tracked the school’s climb from academy to college, and each was resisted by the University of Arizona in Tucson, which did not want a rival. The final step went around the legislature altogether. In 1958 backers put the name on a statewide ballot, and voters made it Arizona State University. Tucson has not entirely forgiven this, and the initials stuck at once because the alternative, “Arizona State,” was already the football team.
The mascot came earlier, in 1946, when the newly minted Arizona State College students voted 819 to 196 to drop the Bulldog for the Sun Devil; the costumed devil is Sparky. The Owls had come before the Bulldogs.
SkySong is the newest word in the set. In 2005 the City of Scottsdale and the ASU Foundation agreed to redevelop the dead Los Arcos Mall corner at Scottsdale and McDowell Roads; Plaza Companies became master developer in 2006 and the first two office buildings opened in 2008. The name was the developers’ choice, and no public record explains it.
What it is not
ASU is not in Scottsdale, and SkySong is not a campus where undergraduates take classes; it is offices, research tenants, apartments and a hotel. ASU is also not “U of A,” which is the University of Arizona in Tucson, 110 miles south.
The fine print
The numbers are the story. ASU reported more than 200,000 students for the 2025-26 academic year, the first time it had passed that mark, and 119,300 of them were online, up from 30,000 a decade earlier. The Tempe campus held about 51,200 in fall 2025, with another 10,800 downtown Phoenix, 5,500 at the Polytechnic campus in Mesa and 5,200 at West Valley. Which of those figures makes ASU “the biggest university in America” depends on whether you count online students, and ASU’s rivals for the title count differently. The university’s own press is careful to say “one of the largest.”
For Scottsdale the practical effects are three. Housing: the city’s south end and the apartment blocks along McDowell Road absorb students and young faculty, which is part of why South Scottsdale rents run below the city average. Nightlife: Old Town’s entertainment district is a short ride from Tempe, and the Thursday-to-Saturday crowd skews younger than the resorts’ guests; the nightlife guide explains the geography. Traffic: a home football game puts tens of thousands of cars on the roads that connect Tempe to Scottsdale, and the smart local checks the schedule before planning a Saturday errand south of Osborn Road.
SkySong is the piece most often misdescribed. The city owns the land, the ASU Foundation holds the ground lease, and private developers built and lease the buildings; the arrangement was the city’s bet that a university brand would revive a corner the mall had killed. The buildings filled: by 2011 the first two were about 95 percent leased, apartments opened in 2013, and SkySong 3, 4 and 5 followed through 2019. The shade structure over the central plaza is the landmark.