Shandong’s capital gave its university its name, and the university has grown to match the city. University of Jinan, founded in 1948, is a comprehensive institution co-built by the provincial government and the Ministry of Education, with nine disciplines in the ESI global top 1 percent and eleven discipline categories under one roof.
The school’s history is a quiet climb with a long tail. Founded in 1948, it has spent more than seven decades training teachers, engineers, doctors and managers for the province, and its motto, “Resolution, Erudition, and Pursuit of Truth and Excellence,” still frames the daily work. Nearly 400,000 alumni have gone out into the world since the first class.
Today 23 colleges run about 70 undergraduate programs across eleven discipline categories, supported by 7 first-level doctoral programs, 26 first-level master’s programs and 5 post-doctoral stations. Nine disciplines sit in the ESI global top 1 percent, ten are ranked by ShanghaiRanking among the world’s best disciplines, and 77 provincial-and-above research platforms, including a 111 talent-introduction base and a ministry education engineering center, anchor the academic floor.
The faculty of about 2,300 includes 399 professors and over 1,600 doctorate holders, with six overseas academicians and 34 national-level talents among them, and two national Huang Danian-style teaching teams lead the classroom side.
Teaching is where the university shows its breadth: 20 national first-class programs, four national featured programs, 11 programs accredited through engineering education and eight through normal-education certification, with eight normal programs exempted from the national teacher-certification exam. A place among China’s first innovation-entrepreneurship demonstration universities and 17,000-plus awards in national student competitions round out the record.
Research has produced two national technology invention awards and two national science and technology progress awards, alongside 1,222 national research projects, 3,674 invention patents and 22,000-plus papers in SCI, EI and SSCI journals. The university’s social-science journal is a CSSCI source.
Internationally, UJN has ties with 120-plus universities in more than 20 countries, runs a China-Africa joint laboratory and a Confucius Institute in the Republic of the Congo, and hosts a Sino-foreign institution on campus. Its main campus covers 243 hectares in Jinan with 36,000-plus full-time students on the rolls. The capital that named the university has, after seven decades, a university worth the name.
Data Source: UJN Official Website (as of 2026)
