Colorado Mesa University: Grand Junction's Four-Year College

Colorado Mesa University in Grand Junction is the largest university on Colorado's Western Slope, a stretch of the state separated from the Front Range by the Continental Divide and three hundred miles of mountain and plateau. The school was founded in nineteen twenty-five as Grand Junction Junior College, created to give students on this side of the Rockies access to higher education without an eight-hour drive to Denver or Fort Collins. It grew into a four-year institution over the following decades and became Mesa State College in nineteen eighty-eight.

In two thousand eleven, with a graduate enrollment program in place, it was elevated to university status and took its current name. Today it enrolls nearly ten thousand students and serves as the educational and cultural anchor of a region whose economy has swung between ranching, oil and gas extraction, and tourism. For the towns along the Grand Valley, it has been the difference between sending children away and keeping them close.