Ulyanovsk State University (Russian: Ульяновский государственный университет, romanised: Ulyanovskiy gosudarstvennyy universitet) is a public, research university, located in Ulyanovsk, Russia. City of Ulyanovsk (formerly Simbirsk, founded in 1648) is situated on the Volga River, about 440 miles east of Moscow and has a population of 700,000. The university, one of the largest in that region, enrolls some 16,000 students in six colleges offering 68 majors and boasts considerable international ties. USU was one of the first among Russian universities to join Bologna process and started to reform its Doctoral, Master's and Bachelor's standards of degrees. Simbirsk People's University was established in 1919 as a public, coeducational university and had only 2 faculties of science (math and physics) and business (sociology and economics). It changed its name to Lenin Simbirsk State University in 1920 and consisted of 8 institutes and faculties but closed its doors just a year later because of a dismal economic situation in the country.