Colorado Mesa University

Grand Junction had no college of its own until September twenty-first, nineteen twenty-five, when Grand Junction Junior College opened in an abandoned schoolhouse downtown with just thirty-nine students in seven classes. It was the first institution of higher education on Colorado's Western Slope. The school changed its name several times over the decades, becoming Mesa College in nineteen thirty-seven and earning four-year status in nineteen seventy-four.

By two thousand eleven the state had designated it Colorado Mesa University. Today it enrolls more than ten thousand students and anchors the economic and cultural life of the Grand Valley, a place that in nineteen twenty-five had to borrow a decommissioned building just to get started.