Colleges in Denver
Denver is located smack dab in the middle of the state of Colorado. Technically, the full name of the area is the “City and County of Denver,” and it’s also the state capital and most populous municipality in the state. This Beta World City is one of the fastest growing major cities and home to 20 higher education institutions.
The Mile High City, named so for its exactly one-mile-high elevation above sea level, has its own educational facility, which houses three different institutions. The Auraria Campus hosts more than 63,000 students and features the Tivoli Union, a lounge, brewery, cafeteria, movie theatre, and more for students of all three institutions. The University of Colorado Denver, one of the three that calls Auraria headquarters, is the largest research institution in Colorado, while the Metropolitan State University of Denver (MSU) is the largest of the three, maintaining a student body of over 20,000 students. The third institution is the Community College of Denver, one of the 13 members of the Colorado Community College System. The institution focuses on underrepresented, first generation, and minority students, and it’s the only 2-year college to share a campus with two 4-year institutions in the nation.
The majority of Denver’s colleges are split between for-profit and nonprofit. On the nonprofit side is the University of Denver, which claims the honorific of being the first institution of higher learning in the city, as well as the oldest in the Rocky Mountain Region of the US. The city is also home to a campus of Johnson & Wales University, a career-oriented institution, as well as Regis University, a Roman Catholic, Jesuit university.
For-profit institutions include the Lincoln College of Technology, Colorado Technical College, The Art Institute of Colorado, National American University, Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design, and Rocky Vista University College of Osteopathic Medicine. There are also four seminaries in the city, Denver Seminary, Saint John Vianney Theological Seminary, and the Iliff School of Theology, as well as a Jewish yeshiva, Yeshiva Toras Chaim Talmudical Seminary.
Transportation in Denver, Colorado, is varied. With streets laid out in a grid pattern following the four cardinal directions, driving is one of the primary modes of transport. The city does feature more than 850 miles of bicycle lanes, as well as micro-mobility options including electric scooters and e-bike services. Denver is also the sixteenth most walkable of the 50 largest US cities, so there are plenty of ways to get around!
