University of Missouri

The University of Missouri in Columbia is Missouri's flagship public land-grant university, founded in 1839 as the first public university west of the Mississippi River. It is the original campus of the University of Missouri System. The grounds occupy a large site in Columbia, a college town in the center of the state.

Colleges and schools include arts and science; agriculture, food and natural resources; business; education; engineering; journalism; law; medicine; nursing; veterinary medicine; and health professions. The Missouri School of Journalism opened in 1908 as the first journalism school at a university. The University of Missouri Research Reactor supplies radioisotopes for medicine and research, and University Hospital supports clinical training.

Enrollment is about 31,000, including graduate and professional students. International students are a modest share, typically in the single-digit percentages, from many countries. Faculty number more than 2,000. Alumni include Walmart founder Sam Walton, playwright Tennessee Williams, who studied journalism there, and broadcaster Walter Cronkite, who attended the journalism school.

Graduate awards include MA, MS, professional master's degrees, JD, MD, DVM, and PhD work that mixes coursework with supervised research. The academic year is two semesters. Teaching and research assistantships are the usual doctoral support. Columbia is a mid-sized campus city; graduate students work in labs, newsrooms, clinics, and the reactor as well as in classrooms.

In the Grad School Navigator directory, University of Missouri lists 13 graduate programs across 11 subjects: 5 master's programs and 8 doctoral programs, with the widest choice in communication, media & journalism, statistics and civil engineering.