University of Kentucky

The University of Kentucky (UK, UKY, or U of K) is a public land-grant research university in Lexington, Kentucky, United States. Founded in 1865 by John Bryan Bowman as the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Kentucky, 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 35,952 students in the fall of 2024. The institution comprises 16 colleges and offers undergraduate, graduate, and professional programs across a wide range of disciplines. It is classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research spending and doctorate production". 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. The university also hosts the Linguistic Atlas Project, an archive of American English dialect survey materials housed in the College of Arts & Sciences. 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.