Welcome to the University of Kentucky, here in Lexington. Founded in 1865 by John Bryan Bowman as the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Kentucky, this public land-grant research 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 university comprises 16 colleges and offers undergraduate, graduate, and professional programs across a wide range of disciplines. You should know 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 dollars on research and development in 2022, ranking it 61st in the nation.
On campus there are seven libraries; the largest is the William T. Young Library, a federal depository hosting 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. Notice the William T. Young Library nearby, the largest of the university's seven libraries and home to the Linguistic Atlas Project.