University of Maryland, College Park
College Park, Maryland is the location of the University of Maryland, UMD, or just Maryland. This institution is a public land-grant research university. The University of Maryland, which dates its beginnings back to 1856, serves as the flagship school for the University System of Maryland. This makes it the biggest university in both the state and the metropolitan region around Washington, DC. Its 12 schools and colleges together provide access to more than 200 degree-granting programmes, including 92 undergraduate majors, 107 master's degrees, and 83 doctorate programmes. UMD participates in intercollegiate sports as a member of the Big Ten Conference and is a member of both the Association of American Universities and the Big Ten Conference.
Because of its close proximity to the nation's capital, the University of Maryland has formed a number of research partnerships with the federal government. As a result of these partnerships, the University of Maryland's faculty has access to research funding and institutional support from a variety of federal agencies, including the National Institutes of Health, NASA, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Security Agency, and the Department of Homeland Security. It is categorised as a "R1: Doctoral University – Very high research activity" and is referred to as a "Public Ivy," which indicates that the quality of education it provides is on par with that provided by the private Ivy League. The University of Maryland's Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice is consistently rated first in the country and among the best in the world, therefore it is no surprise that the university as a whole is consistently placed among the top 100 institutions worldwide and in the United States.
The University of Maryland, College Park and the University of Maryland, Baltimore formalised their strategic partnership in 2016. This came after the two campuses worked together to successfully create more innovative medical, scientific, and educational programmes, as well as greater research grants and joint faculty appointments, than either campus has been able to accomplish on its own. According to the National Science Foundation, the university ranked 16th overall in the country and 10th among all public institutions in terms of the total amount of money spent on research and development in the year 2020, which was $1.1 billion combined. The University of Maryland has an estimated operating budget of around $2.2 billion as of the year 2021.