In the year 1949 the Hungarian Parliament ordered, in its 23rd Act, that a university of heavy industry should be established in Miskolc in order to improve higher education in the fields of technology and engineering in the country. Thanks to its Faculties of Mining and Metallurgical Engineering, the new university of technology, which was set up in the centre of the Borsod industrial region, goes back of 250 years.
In 1735 the Viennese Court chamber established a school of mining and metallurgy (Bergschule) in the town of Selmecbánya.
In the territory of the Habsburg Empire this school was the first institution of higher education which was set up by the state and not maintained by the church. At the same time it represented the first institution of higher education in the field of technology in the world. After the 1867 compromise between Austria and Hungary the academy became a Hungarian state institution under the name of the Hungarian Royal Academy of Mining and Forestry. From 1904 it worked as a College of Mining and Forestry. After Selmecbánya became a part of the new state of Czechoslovakia, the college moved to Sopron in 1919, where, in 1922, it was renamed the College of Mining and Forest Engineering. In 1934 the College joined the newly organized Palatine Joseph University of Engineering and Economics as its Faculty of Mining, Metallurgical and Forest Engineering.

The section of Mining and Metallurgical Engineering worked in this organisational framework until 1949 when it became the Faculty of Mining and Metallurgical Engineering of the University of Heavy Industry, established in the same year in Miskolc, which also had a newly established faculty - that of Mechanical Engineering. In February 1950 the present location of the university was marked out on an area of about 85 hectares. In 1969 the university expanded, when it incorporated the Dunaújváros College Faculty of Metallurgical Engineering and Metalworking. Since 1981 lawyers, and since 1987 economists have also been educated in Miskolc. Since 1992 arts subjects have also been taught in our institution which took the new name of the University of Miskolc in 1990. Our most important objective is to create a university unique in the country. For this reason since 1997 music education has been offered at the Bartók Béla Institute of Music of the University of Miskolc. Since 1998 the Research Laboratory of Mining Chemistry of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences has been continuing its 40 year work in the framework of the institution under the name of Research Institute for Applied Chemistry. Health education started in the same year, too. On 1 January, 2000 the Dunaújváros College became independent, while the Comenius Teacher Training College of Sárospatak joined the organisational framework of the university.