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,[7] the university is one of the state’s two land-grant universities (the other being Kentucky State University) and the institution with the highest enrollment in the state, with 30,545 students as of fall 2019.[2]
The institution comprises 16 colleges, a graduate school, 93 undergraduate programs, 99 master programs, 66 doctoral programs, and four professional programs.[8][needs update] It is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”.[9] According to the National Science Foundation, Kentucky spent $393 million on research and development in 2018, ranking it 63rd in the nation.[10]
The University of Kentucky has fifteen libraries on campus. The largest is the William T. Young Library, a federal depository, hosting 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.[11]