Yunnan University has now gathered a galaxy of talents in liberal arts, science, law, technology, economics, agriculture, medicine, business administration, and fine arts, and has developed into a modern university featuring ethnology, biology, resource development and environmental protection, borderland research, and Southeast Asia and South Asia research.

According to a recent discipline ranking released by the MOE, its ethnology, ecology and political science programs rank 2nd, 6th and 10th respectively in the country. According to the 2012 Essential Science Indicators, biology and chemistry at Yunnan University were among the top one percent of the world's academic disciplines.

Currently, Yunnan University has 26 schools, nine research institutes, a teaching department for general courses, an affiliated hospital and a graduate school, with 16,682 full-time undergraduates and 13,537 full-time graduate students. It has 92 majors in undergraduate programs, 12 state-level featured majors, two state-level professional comprehensive pilot reform programs, 10 state-level quality courses, three state-level publicly-available quality courses, six state-level quality video open courses, four national bilingual teaching model courses, an MOE-IBM quality course, an MOE-INTEL quality course, and two MOE-IBM specialty comprehensive reform programs.

The university also has four state-level key disciplines including ethnology, ecology, specialized history and microbiology as well as 52 provincial key disciplines. Thirteen of its primary disciplines and 91 of its secondary disciplines are authorized to offer PhDs, 14 centers offer post-doctoral studies, 38 primary disciplines and 205 secondary disciplines offer master's degrees, and 22 disciplines offer professional master's degrees.