About Us

The University of Kentucky (UK, UKY, or U of K) is a public land-grant research university in Lexington, Kentucky. Founded in 1865 by John Bryan Bowman as the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Kentucky,[9] the university is one of the state's two land-grant universities (the other being Kentucky State University). It is the institution with the highest enrollment in the state, with 32,710 students in the fall of 2022.

The institution comprises 16 colleges, a graduate school, 93 undergraduate programs, 99 master programs, 66 doctoral programs, and 4 professional programs.[needs update] It is classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity".[12] According to the National Science Foundation, Kentucky spent $476.5 million on research and development in 2022, ranking it 61st in the nation.

The University of Kentucky has seven libraries on campus.The largest is the William T. Young Library, a federal depository that hosts subjects related to social sciences, humanities, and life sciences collections. Since 1997, the university has focused expenditures increasingly on research, following a compact formed by the Kentucky General Assembly. The directive mandated that the university become a "Top 20" public research institution, in terms of an overall ranking to be determined by the university itself, by 2020. Two alumni from the university have won Nobel Prizes.

In the early commonwealth of Kentucky, higher education was limited to children from prominent families, disciplined apprentices, and young men seeking entry into clerical, legal, and medical professions. As the first university in the territory that would become Kentucky, Transylvania University was the primary center for education. After a merger it became "Kentucky University".