With more than 43,000 students and over 120 fields of study in 15 departments, it is Germany's fifth largest university and one of the foremost centers of German intellectual life.

In 1631, Pope Urban VIII and Emperor Ferdinand II issued privileges, allowing the establishment of a university in Münster.

However, due to a lack of funding, they were only put to use in 1780, when the modern University of Münster was founded with four faculties: Law, Medicine, Philosophy and Theology.

[5] 1999 saw the beginning of the Bologna Process, which aimed to ensure comparability in the standards and quality of higher education qualifications.

The Münster School of Business Administration and Economics was the first one to establish bachelor's and master's degrees.

[8] The university's IT organization ("Zentrum für Informationsverarbeitung" (ZIV)) provides central services for information processing and communication technology.

[10] The cultural programme also includes various museums, music (choirs, ensembles, orchestra), theatres and cinemas.

which is a coalition of fifteen major research-intensive and leading medical universities in Germany with a full disciplinary spectrum, excluding any defining engineering sciences.