Founded in 1851, Northwestern University is a private research university with campuses in Evanston and Chicago in Illinois, United States. The school has a total undergraduate enrollment of 8,600 and 12 undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools offering 124 undergraduate degrees and 145 graduate and professional degrees. The school It uses a quarter-based academic calendar. Freshmen are guaranteed on-campus housing if requested in their applications. The school's 11 residential colleges offer thematic living quarters for social and academic activities.

John Evans and eight other lawyers, businessmen and Methodist leaders founded Northwestern to serve the people of a region that had once been known as the Northwest Territory. What began as farmland and swampland in the 1850s became the Northwestern campus and the city of Evanston, named after Evans.

The university's schools of journalism, management, engineering, and communication are among the most academically productive in the U.S. It has one of the largest university endowments in the United States, valued at $7.9 billion in 2013. One of only 62 institutions elected to the Association of American Universities (1917), Northwestern was awarded more than $500 million in research grants in 2010–2011, placing it in the first tier of the major research universities in the United States by the Center for Measuring University Performance.

Northwestern University is a Division I school in the Big Ten athletic conference and remains the only private university in the conference. Northwestern's women's lacrosse team has won multiple NCAA national championships. The school has hundreds of campus organizations fulfill students' varied interests.