Liaoning University’s predecessor was Shenyang Commercial College, which was set up by the People's Government of the Northeast in November, 1948. In over half a century's development, Liaoning University has grown into a multiple-discipline comprehensive university, embracing Chinese language and literature, history, philosophy, economics, law, foreign languages, art, natural science, engineering and management.

Liaoning University was established in Sep, 1958, when the amalgamation of the Northeast Institute of Finance and Economics, Shenyang Normal College and Shenyang Institute of Russian took place. Marshal Zhu De wrote an inscription of the school name for the University. At present, the University has an area of 1,420,000 square meters (including the University proper, Liaoyang Foreign Languages College and the Xinchengzi Campus), with a building area totaling 600, 000 square meters.

Liaoning University is one of the key universities listed in the nation's "Project 211" and affirmed by the Ministry of Education. The University has fifteen colleges and five college-level faculties. Altogether, the University has forty-three undergraduate disciplines, fifty-three master-degree-granting disciplines, including MBA and JM. The University is also invested with authority to grant doctorate of philosophy in theoretical economics (the first level discipline) and nine other doctorates (the second level discipline). Furthermore, the University has three mobile stations for post-doctoral studies to its credit, with two national key disciplines of world economy and national economy in addition to a base for cultivating personnel of basic national economy, and a key base for research on humanities, and a center of research on the system of comparative economy as designated by the Ministry of Education. The University has eleven province-level key disciplines and one test and detection center.

At present, Liaoning University has a teaching body of 1,116 full-time faculty members, among whom there are six hundred and fourteen professors and associate professors. The University has 18,700 students of different kinds, ranging from undergraduates and graduate students to foreign students.

Since it was founded, Liaoning University has established formal friendly relationships of academic cooperation and interflow with over forty higher schools and research institutions in fourteen countries, and has since fostered over a hundred thousand full-time students for the country and over 5,000 foreign students as well from forty-two countries including the United States, Japan, Russia, Italy, the United Kingdom, France, the Republic of Korea and Thailand.

Confronted with opportunities and challenges of the new century, Liaoning University is accelerating its reform, innovation and development. Now with the strengthening of disciplines as its propelling force, teaching and research as its dominant attention, the building up of teaching and managing staff as its foundation, the improvement of campus environment as its supporting condition, reform as its motive power, the intensification of administration work as its means of achieving its goal, and last but not least, strengthening Party-building and ideological and political work as its bulwark, the University will double its effort to build itself into a teaching-and-research type university at a fairly high academic level and with certain international influence in five to ten years.