University of Colorado Boulder

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The University of Colorado Boulder (commonly known as CU Boulder or simply CU) is a public research university located in Boulder, Colorado. Founded in 1876, five months before Colorado became a state, it is the flagship university of the University of Colorado system. CU Boulder is a member of the Association of American Universities, is classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity," and has been referred to as a Public Ivy. Home to five Nobel Laureates since 1989 and the only university to send space instruments to every planet in the solar system, CU Boulder has aligned its efforts to achieve research excellence and global sustainability impact. The campus spans 600 acres and enrolls a total undergraduate population of 33,384 students (fall 2024), with a student-to-faculty ratio of 19:1.

History

In 1861, an act of the territorial legislature of Colorado called for the creation of a public university in Boulder. The university was not officially founded until 1876, and instruction began the next year. On March 14, 1876, the Colorado territorial legislature passed an amendment to the state constitution that provided money for the establishment of the University of Colorado in Boulder, the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, and the Colorado Agricultural College in Fort Collins.

Two cities competed for the site of the University of Colorado: Boulder and Cañon City. The consolation prize for the losing city was to be the home to the new Colorado State Prison. Cañon City was at a disadvantage as it was already home to the Colorado Territorial Prison. Boulder ultimately prevailed. On September 20, 1875, the first cornerstone was laid for the first building — Old Main — on the CU campus. Colorado became a state on August 1, 1876, and the university officially opened on September 5, 1877.

At the time, there were few high schools in the state that could adequately prepare students for university work, so in addition to the university, a preparatory school was formed on campus. CU hired its first female professor, Mary Rippon, in 1878. It hired its first African-American professor, Charles H. Nilon, in 1956, and its first African-American librarian, Mildred Nilon, in 1962. Its first African American female graduate, Lucile Berkeley Buchanan, received her degree in 1918.

The university mascot, the buffalo, was chosen via a campus newspaper competition in 1934 and was first used at a football game that fall when students rented a bison calf to display. During World War II, Colorado was one of 131 colleges and universities nationally that took part in the V-12 Navy College Training Program, which offered students a path to a Navy commission.

Campus and Architecture

The University of Colorado at Boulder has grown from one building in 1876 into a teaching and research institution of national reputation. The setting and uniform architectural style of Main Campus contributes greatly to its reputation. The main CU Boulder campus is located south of the Pearl Street Mall and east of Chautauqua Auditorium. It consists of academic and residential buildings as well as research facilities. The East Campus is about a quarter-mile from the main campus and is composed mainly of athletic fields and research buildings.

CU Boulder's distinctive architectural style, known as Tuscan Vernacular Revival, was designed by architect Charles Klauder. The oldest buildings, such as Old Main (1876) and Macky Auditorium (1923), were in the Collegiate Gothic style of many East Coast schools, and Klauder's initial plans for the university's new buildings, approved in 1919, were in the same style. Architect Charles Z. Klauder, of the Philadelphia firm Day and Klauder, was hired to oversee the new campus plan. Klauder had previously designed buildings for Princeton and Wellesley, along with a 42-story tower for the University of Pittsburgh.

He laid out the campus, with a parklike quadrangle at its center, on a Beaux-Arts site plan with a cardinal axis but departed from the Collegiate Gothic style he and his partner had used at Cornell, Princeton, and Wellesley. Inspired by the foothills setting, he developed a picturesque but unpretentious "Colorado style" that borrows from the Tuscan hill country of northern Italy — an innovative combination of robust stone walls, arcades, towers, and sloping roofs accented by ornate stone chimneys. His buildings are uniformly of local pink Lyons sandstone with red tile roofs.

Fifteen buildings in the "University of Colorado Style" (Tuscan Vernacular Revival) were constructed between 1921 and 1939. To this day, all Boulder campus buildings have been constructed in this unique style and vocabulary of building materials. CU Boulder's campus has been ranked as one of the most beautiful college campuses in the United States by Travel + Leisure and Condé Nast Traveler.

Macky Auditorium is a large building on the north edge of the University of Colorado campus, near 17th Street and University Avenue, which plays host to various talks, plays, and musical performances. The Auditorium opened its doors in 1923, thirteen years after construction started.

With over 200 buildings on 786 acres, the university offers approximately 4,600 different courses in 239 degree programs across the baccalaureate, master's, doctoral, and professional levels.

Research and Academic Excellence

CU Boulder is a member of the Association of American Universities, classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity," and has been referred to as a Public Ivy. The university consists of nine colleges and schools and offers over 150 academic programs, enrolling more than 35,000 students as of January 2022. In 2021, the university attracted the support of over $634 million for research and spent $536 million on research and development according to the National Science Foundation, ranking it 50th in the nation.

Alumni, faculty, and researchers have included 12 Nobel Prize laureates (of whom 5 were affiliated with the university when the prizes were awarded), 10 Pulitzer Prize winners, 11 MacArthur Fellows, 1 Turing Award laureate, 20 astronauts, and 2 associate justices of the United States Supreme Court.

Among CU Boulder's most celebrated Nobel laureates in physics and chemistry: Distinguished Professor Carl Wieman and Professor Eric Cornell won the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics for creating a new form of matter called Bose-Einstein condensate. Professor John Hall won the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics for his contributions to the development of laser-based precision spectroscopy. David Wineland, a researcher affiliated with CU Boulder's physics department and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, won the 2012 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work using laser cooling to trap individual ions, allowing researchers to manipulate and measure individual quantum systems. He shared the prize with France's Serge Haroche.

One of CU Boulder's most significant research facilities is the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP). LASP is the university's first and highest-budget research institute — and the only organization of its kind to have sent scientific instruments to every planet in the solar system, plus the Sun and a host of moons. Founded in 1948 as a collaboration between the U.S. Air Force and the university's physics department, LASP's initial experiments included launching instruments mounted on captured German V-2 rockets in order to study the Sun. LASP employs 750+ scientists, engineers, and students dedicated to space science research in fields including solar physics, planetary atmospheres, dusty plasmas, geophysics, and space weather. The institute has received over $1 billion in research revenue since 2013, predominantly from NASA contracts.

Other important research facilities at the Boulder campus include the Sommers-Bausch Observatory, the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, the Natural Resources Law Center, and the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics.

In the 2026 edition of Best Colleges, the University of Colorado Boulder is ranked No. 97 in National Universities by U.S. News & World Report. It is also ranked No. 46 among Top Public Schools.

Athletics

The Colorado Buffaloes are the athletic teams that represent the University of Colorado Boulder. The university sponsors 16 varsity sports teams. Both the men's and women's teams are called the Buffaloes, or "Buffs" for short. The official school colors are silver and gold, adopted in 1888 as a symbol of the mineral wealth of the state.

The university participates as a member of the Big 12 Conference at the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS). The University of Colorado Board of Regents unanimously approved a resolution allowing the University of Colorado Boulder to join the Big 12 Conference effective for the 2024–25 academic year. This move ended the Buffaloes' 12-year membership in the Pac-12 Conference.

With 17 varsity sports teams, the CU Boulder Buffs have won 29 national championships, in cross country, skiing, golf, and football. Colorado is one of the dominant programs in the NCAA in skiing, winning 21 total national championships, including 20 NCAA Championships, most recently in 2024.

One of the most recognizable traditions in college athletics is the live buffalo mascot, Ralphie. A buffalo leading the team onto the field dates as far back as 1934, and the Ralphie tradition began in 1966. In 1966, the Student Body Government decided that the University of Colorado Boulder needed a full-time live buffalo mascot. Freshman Class Officer Bill Lowery spoke to his father, who purchased and donated the original "Ralphie" to Colorado in March of 1966. The most recent addition to the lineage is Ralphie VII, who made her debut when the Buffaloes faced Wyoming on September 20, 2025. The one-year-old American Bison weighed in at 700 pounds and was a gift from the Beauprez Family, multigenerational University of Colorado alumni.

CU Boulder's football program competes at Folsom Field. Bill McCartney is the most famous head coach in program history, leading Colorado to its only national championship in 1990. Current head football coach Deion Sanders was approved by the university's board of regents in December 2022.

Student Life and Culture

The Boulder location provides an engaging living environment, with 300 days of sunshine per year, year-round cultural and recreational opportunities, and one of the most beautiful college campuses in the country.

The campus offers art galleries, a natural history museum, theaters, concert halls, and an extensive calendar of social and cultural events, highlighted by the annual Conference on World Affairs, musical performances by the Grammy Award-winning Takács Quartet, and the Colorado Shakespeare Festival. The Conference on World Affairs began in 1948 and is still going strong, and the Colorado Shakespeare Festival was formally established in 1958.

The University of Colorado Student Government (CUSG) is the student government for the University of Colorado Boulder. The government contains three branches: executive, legislative, and judicial. Presiding officers for the student government are elected in a bi-annual vote administered to the 30,000 students at the university. The student government has an autonomy agreement with the University Administration and oversees an annual budget of $36.6 million.

Founded in May 1919, the Hiking Club is the longest-running student organization at the University of Colorado Boulder. CU Boulder's proximity to the Rocky Mountains makes outdoor recreation central to campus culture, with easy access to hiking, skiing, climbing, and cycling. CU-Boulder describes itself as having one of the most active college campuses in the US, with athletics and outdoors projects playing a central role in the student experience.

Students join the alumni Forever Buffs Network, an extended family of hundreds of thousands of CU Boulder alumni, students, faculty, and staff worldwide that encourages lifelong connection and engagement. There are more than 300,000 CU alumni from all four campuses who live in — and contribute to — Colorado.