Kyrgyz National University (吉爾吉斯民族大學), known officially as Kyrgyz National University named after Jusup Balasagyn (KNU), is a public, non-profit higher education institution in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Its origins trace to March 30, 1925, when the Council of the Kara-Kirghiz Autonomous Region discussed establishing the Kara-Kyrgyz Institute of Education, which opened that October in Pishpek, the former name of Bishkek. The institution changed names and forms several times over the following decades, eventually becoming Kyrgyz State University in 1951 and taking its current name in 2002, when Kyrgyzstan’s government renamed it in honor of Jusup Balasagyn, an 11th-century Turkic poet, philosopher, and statesman of the Kara-Khanid Khanate best known for the political treatise Kutadgu Bilig. KNU is a legal entity whose founder is the Government of the Kyrgyz Republic, represented as of 2026 by the Ministry of Science, Higher Education and Innovation, which assumed oversight of universities and research institutions after President Sadyr Japarov split the former Ministry of Education and Science into two separate ministries in May 2025.