Seoul National University (SNU; Hangul: 서울대학교; Hanja: 서울大學校; RR: Seoul Daehakgyo, colloquially Seouldae) is a national research university located in Seoul, South Korea.
Founded in 1946, Seoul National University is considered to be the most prestigious university in the country. The university has three campuses: the main campus in Gwanak and two additional campuses in Daehangnoand Pyeongchang. The university comprises sixteen colleges, one graduate school and nine professional schools. The student body consists of nearly 17,000 undergraduate and 11,000 graduate students. According to data compiled by KEDI, the university spends more on its students per capita than any other university in the country that enrolls at least 10,000 students.
Seoul National University holds a memorandum of understanding with over 700 academic institutions in 40 countries, the World Bank and a general academic exchange program with the University of Pennsylvania. The Graduate School of Business offers dual master's degrees with Duke University, ESSEC Business School and Peking University, double-degrees with the MIT Sloan School of Management and Yale School of Management and MBA-, MS- and PhD-candidate exchange programs with universities in ten countries on four continents. Following a government mandate to globalize Korean universities, the university's international faculty head count peaked at 242 or 4% of the total in 2010, but subsequently declined.
Seoul National University, or its undergraduate liberal arts college in particular, finds its roots in Keijo Imperial University, one of the Imperial Universities founded by the Japanese Empire. In the 1940s, under the guidance of the US military government in Korea, the university merged with various colleges and professional schools, and the consolidated institution was renamed as Seoul National University in accordance with the Act of the National University Seoul enacted in the National Assembly.