The University of Konstanz (German: Universität Konstanz) is a university in the city of Konstanz in Baden-Württemberg, Germany. Its main campus was opened on the Gießberg in 1972 after being founded in 1966. The university is Germany's southernmost university and is situated on the shore of Lake Constance just four kilometres from the Swiss border. It has been successful in all three funding lines of the Excellence Initiative, and is therefore one of Germany's elite "Universities of Excellence", a group of prestigious universities often considered the German Ivy League. The university is ranked in top 100 worldwide in the field of social policy and administration in the 2020 QS World University Rankings, and ranked 51 in Political Science according to the 2020 ShanghaiRanking. The U.S. Department of Energy also refers to the University of Konstanz as a "small Harvard".