Michigan State University

Michigan State University (MSU) is a public research university located in East Lansing, Michigan, United States. MSU was founded in 1855 and became the nation's first land-grant institution under the Morrill Act of 1862, serving as a model for future land-grant universities.

MSU pioneered the studies of packaging, hospitality business, plant biology, supply chain management, and telecommunication. U.S. News & World Report ranks several MSU graduate programs in the nation's top 10, including African history, industrial and organizational psychology, osteopathic medicine, and veterinary medicine, and identifies its graduate programs in elementary education, secondary education, and nuclear physics as the best in the country.

Following the introduction of the Morrill Act, the college became coeducational and expanded its curriculum beyond agriculture. Today, MSU is the seventh-largest university in the United States (in terms of enrollment), with over 50,085 students and 5,100 faculty members. There are approximately 532,000 living MSU alumni worldwide.

MSU's Division I sports teams are called the Spartans, which compete in the Big Ten Conference. MSU's football team won the Rose Bowl in 1954, 1956, 1988 and 2014 and six national championships. Its men's basketball team won the NCAA National Championship in 1979 and 2000 and enjoyed a streak of seven Final Four appearances since the 1998-1999 season. Its men's ice hockey won national titles in 1966, 1986 and 2007. Historically, cross country is Michigan State's most successful sport
 The college first admitted women in 1870, although at that time there were no female residence halls. The few women who enrolled either boarded with faculty families or made the arduous stagecoach trek from Lansing. From the early days, female students took the same rigorous scientific agriculture courses as male students. In 1896, the faculty created a "Women Course" that melded a home economics curriculum with liberal arts and sciences. That same year, the College turned the old Abbot Hall male dorm into a women's dormitory. It was not until 1899 that the State Agricultural College admitted its first African American student, William O. Thompson. After graduation, he taught at what is now Tuskegee University. President Jonathan L. Snyder invited its president Booker T. Washington to be the Class of 1900 commencement speaker. A few years later, Myrtle Craig became the first woman African-American student to enroll at the College. Along with the Class of 1907, she received her degree from U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, commencement speaker for the Semi-Centennial celebration. The City of East Lansing was incorporated in that same year, and two years later the college officially changed its name to Michigan Agricultural College (M.A.C.).
  Since the end of the Hannah era in 1969, Michigan State has shifted its focus from increasing the size of its student body to advancing its national and global reputation. In September 2005, current president Lou Anna Simon called for MSU, one of the public ivy institutions, to become the global model leader for Land Grant institutions by the year 2012. Her plans include creating a new residential college and increasing grants awarded from the National Institutes of Health past the US$100 million mark. While there are over 100 Land-grant universities in the United States, she has stated that she would like Michigan State University to be the leader.

Michigan State, the University of Michigan and Wayne State University created the University Research Corridor in 2006. This alliance was formed to transform and strengthen Michigan's economy by reaching out to businesses, policymakers, innovators, investors and the public to speed up technology transfer, make resources more accessible and help attract new jobs to the state