The University of Kentucky, also known as UK, is a public, co-educational, land-grant university located in Lexington, Kentucky. Founded in 1865 by John Bowman as the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Kentucky, the university is the largest in the Commonwealth by enrollment, with 27,209 students, and is also the highest ranked research university in the state, according to U.S. News and World Report.
The university is home to 16 colleges, a graduate school, 93 undergraduate programs, 99 master programs, 66 doctoral programs, and four professional programs. The University of Kentucky has fifteen libraries on campus. The largest is William T. Young Library, a federal depository, hosting subjects related to social sciences, humanities and life sciences collections. The university currently has an endowment of $831 million.
In recent years, the university has focused expenditures increasingly on research, following a compact formed by the Kentucky General Assembly in 1997. 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 the year 2020.
