public coeducational institution of higher learning in Vermillion, southeastern South Dakota, U.S. It was established by the Dakota Territorial Legislature in 1862, and it opened in 1882. It was the first public institution of higher education in the Dakotas. Total enrollment is about 8,000.

The University of South Dakota offers about 100 undergraduate and graduate programs, as well as education specialist and associate degree programs. The university is composed of schools of law, medicine, education, and business; the graduate school; and colleges of fine arts and arts and sciences. It has the state's only law and medical schools. Research and academic units include the Disaster Mental Health Institute, the Institute of American Indian Studies, the Business Research Bureau, the South Dakota Geological Survey, the Governmental Research Bureau, and the National Music Museum and Center for Study of the History of Musical Instruments. The Black Hills Playhouse, established in the 1940s, is located in Custer State Park. The telecommunications centre was named for physicist Ernest Orlando Lawrence (Lawrence, Ernest Orlando), who graduated from the school in 1922 and was awarded the 1939 Nobel Prize for Physics for having invented the cyclotron.