The Pennsylvania State University

The Pennsylvania State University is a public land-grant research university. It was founded in 1855 as the Farmers' High School of Pennsylvania and became the state's land-grant institution in 1863. Its largest campus, University Park, is in State College in central Pennsylvania. Penn State is a multicampus system with Commonwealth Campuses across the state, a College of Medicine in Hershey, Dickinson Law in Carlisle and the online World Campus.

Most academic colleges are at University Park. They include the Eberly College of Science, the College of Engineering, the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, the College of Agricultural Sciences, the Smeal College of Business, the College of Health and Human Development, the College of Information Sciences and Technology and the Bellisario College of Communications. Penn State is known for materials science, meteorology, acoustics, agricultural sciences and supply chain management. Research units include the Applied Research Laboratory, a Navy-affiliated center, the Materials Research Institute, the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences and the Institute for Computational and Data Sciences.

Penn State enrolls about 88,000 students across the state. About 48,000 study at University Park, including several thousand graduate and professional students. Students come from more than 100 countries. Alumni include Nobel laureate biochemist Paul Berg, astronaut Guion Bluford and actor Keegan-Michael Key.

The Graduate School oversees PhDs, research master's degrees and professional master's programs, and many of the professional degrees are also offered online through World Campus. Doctoral students are usually funded through graduate assistantships and fellowships, and the engineering and materials programs work closely with federal agencies and industry. The academic year runs on semesters. State College is a college town of about 40,000 people in the Nittany Valley, within a few hours' drive of Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C.

In the Grad School Navigator directory, The Pennsylvania State University lists 259 graduate programs across 50 subjects: 127 master's programs and 113 doctoral programs, with the widest choice in education, biology and music. The Pennsylvania State University holds rank 40 in the GSN Overall University Ranking.