The University of Nebraska was chartered as a state land-grant institution in 1869. Today, our four campuses are home to nearly 48,000 students, 4,000 faculty members and 8,000 staff. Through our teaching, research and outreach, we serve the people of Nebraska, strengthen the state's economy and contribute to the well-being of people around the world.

Our strategic framework identifies the University’s six priorities:

1. Affordable access to education: ensuring opportunity for all Nebraskans to improve their quality of life through education.
2. High quality academic programs with an emphasis on excellent teaching: academic programs that are aligned with the needs of the state, and a commitment to recruiting and retaining top faculty.
3. Building a talented, competitive workforce and a knowledge-based economy for Nebraska: keeping more top students in Nebraska and providing opportunities for entrepreneurship and global literacy.
4. Excellence in research and scholarly activity: increasing the university’s competitiveness for externally funded research in areas that are important to the state.
5. Strategic and effective engagement with citizens, businesses, agriculture, educational institutions and communities: partnerships to support economic growth.
6. Accountability and cost-effectiveness: using resources wisely, identifying and implementing cost-reduction measures, increasing non-state support and measuring success outcomes.

We serve Nebraska and its citizens in many ways. Among the most important:

• Creating Nebraska's future by giving citizens the opportunity for a better quality of life. An individual with a bachelor's degree earns, on average, $1 million more over a lifetime than an individual with just a high school diploma. But research shows that the benefits of higher education go far beyond the financial benefits to the individual. Higher levels of educational attainment are directly correlated to lower unemployment and less dependence on public assistance, increased voluntarism and civic participation, and better health.
• Keeping kids in Nebraska is essential to our state's future. They will stay here if they have the opportunity for a high quality education at a reasonable cost, and the opportunity for good jobs when they graduate. In 2008, almost half of the Nebraska students who graduated in the top 25 percent of their high school graduating class enrolled at the University of Nebraska. Our mission of educating the next generation is critical to Nebraska's future.
• Finding solutions to Nebraska's challenges. Alternative sources of energy and increased energy efficiency. Effective management of ground water. Crop and livestock productivity. Drought and climate change. New strategies for preventing or curing cancer, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases, diabetes and other diseases. Increasing children's chance of success in grade school, high school and college through early childhood education and intervention. Those and other initiatives are the focus of University of Nebraska research.
• Enriching the cultural life of the state through the fine and performing arts, libraries, museums and science centers.
• Strengthening agriculture through research, education, technology and engagement with Nebraska's farmers, ranchers and food-related businesses. We are working to continue increasing productivity and profitability while helping entrepreneurs build new businesses.
• Addressing critical shortages of health care professionals, especially nurses in rural Nebraska, through new programs and new facilities that will narrow the gap between supply and demand over the next decade.
• Economic recovery. The University of Nebraska isn't the only answer to recovering from the current economic downturn, but it is a critical part of the solution. Nebraska will be successful in the future if it has an educated workforce of young people who are prepared to work in the knowledge economy and who will infuse the state with new ideas and create new companies that attract investment. It will be successful if it has a major research university doing important work in areas that are critical to the state’s future – water, energy, agriculture, public health.