List of Oldest Universities in Continuous Operation

List Of Oldest Universities In Continuous Operation

This is a list of the oldest extant universities in the world. To be included in this table, an educational institution must satisfy a traditional definition of university at the time of its founding. Chronologically it must have been founded before 1500 in Europe or be the oldest university derived from the medieval European model in a region.

The word university is derived from the Latin: universitas magistrorum et scholarium, roughly meaning "community of teachers and scholars". The term was coined by the Italian University of Bologna, which, with a traditional founding date of 1088, is considered the first university. The origin of many medieval universities can be traced to the Christian cathedral schools or monastic schools which appear as early as the 6th century and were run for hundreds of years as such before their formal establishment as university in the high medieval period.

Other institutions of higher learning, like those of ancient Greece, ancient Rome, Byzantium, ancient China, ancient India, the Arab World, are not included in this list due to their cultural, historical and structual dissimilarities from the medieval European university from which the modern university evolved.