University of Wyoming: The Cowboy State's Only University

There is only one four-year university in Wyoming, and it is here in Laramie. That singularity shapes everything about it. The University of Wyoming is not competing with a state university system. It is the state university system. Every Wyoming student seeking a public four-year degree comes through this campus or goes out of state, and that concentration of purpose gives the institution an outsized role in a state of fewer than six hundred thousand people.

The university was chartered in eighteen eighty-six, three years before Wyoming achieved statehood, and opened its doors to students in eighteen eighty-seven, making it older than the state it serves. It was established under the Morrill Land-Grant Act of eighteen sixty-two, the federal legislation that seeded public universities across the country by donating federal land whose sale funded construction and operations. Governor Edward McCook signed the territorial bill authorizing it, and the community donated two hundred and forty acres for the campus.

Laramie sits at seven thousand two hundred and twenty feet above sea level, one of the highest campuses of any major university in the country. The altitude and the high-desert environment have shaped the university's research emphases. Its atmospheric science program studies the jet stream and severe weather patterns that roll across the Great Plains directly above. Its College of Agriculture and Natural Resources works on rangeland management, water rights, and livestock systems relevant to the economy of a state where cattle still outnumber people.

The Wyoming Cowboys football program won fourteen conference championships across seven decades of Mountain States and Western Athletic Conference play. The most famous alumnus is Dick Cheney, who earned his undergraduate degree here in nineteen sixty-five before serving as Secretary of Defense and as the forty-sixth Vice President.

The campus lies at the foot of the Medicine Bow Mountains, and the drive across Interstate Eighty to reach Laramie is one of the more exposed stretches of highway in the continental United States.