An extension office in an old house became Alabama's largest employer
In 1936 the University of Alabama opened a modest extension centre in an old house in downtown Birmingham, enrolling 116 students. That outpost grew into the University of Alabama at Birmingham, now the state's largest employer, with more than 53,000 jobs and one of America's biggest academic medical centres attached.
Medicine drove the growth. When the university's four-year medical school moved from Tuscaloosa to Birmingham in the 1940s, it took over the city's Jefferson and Hillman hospitals. By 1959 grant income passed $1 million and work had begun on a hospital for children. Through the 1960s it became obvious that the extension centre was turning into a university of its own. In 1966 it merged with the medical school, though still run as an offshoot of the Tuscaloosa campus, and in 1969 lawmakers set up a three-campus state system with Birmingham as one of three full institutions and Joseph Volker as its first president.
Its School of Dentistry, which admitted its first students in October 1948 as Alabama's only dental school, pioneered four-handed dentistry and the wider use of trained dental assistants, and between 2012 and 2015 no dental school drew more money from the federal dental research institute, the NIDCR. Research overall brought in more than $715 million in grants and awards in fiscal 2022, and the university holds the top R1 classification for very high research activity.
The health system is enormous. The flagship UAB Hospital, with 1,207 beds, is Alabama's largest and among the ten largest in the nation, home to the state's only Level 1 adult trauma centre. Its O'Neal Comprehensive Cancer Center is the only NCI-designated centre in Alabama and the four surrounding states, and the system logs nearly 2 million clinical visits a year.
The campus itself sprawls across more than 100 city blocks in the Southside neighbourhood, about 636 acres with over 216 buildings. Long a commuter school, it has been reshaping itself as a residential campus, anchored by a central lawn opened in 2008. In fall 2024 it enrolled 20,905 students from more than 110 countries, and its athletic teams, the Blazers, compete in green and gold in 18 NCAA Division I sports.
Source: University of Alabama at Birmingham
