University of Colorado Boulder

The University of Colorado Boulder is the flagship campus of the University of Colorado system, in Boulder at the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. It was founded in 1876, the year Colorado entered the Union. The main campus covers about 600 acres against the Flatirons. It is a public research university organized by colleges of arts and sciences, engineering, business, education, law, music, and environmental design.

Graduate work is especially associated with aerospace engineering, physics, environmental and atmospheric science, and geology. JILA, a joint institute with the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics are central for many doctoral students. The Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences links campus groups to federal climate and earth-science work. Several physics Nobel laureates have been affiliated with JILA and NIST in Boulder.

Enrollment is about 36,000, including roughly 6,000 to 8,000 graduate students. International students are about a tenth of the student body. Faculty number about 1,800. Alumni include U.S. Supreme Court justice Byron White, filmmaker Robert Redford, who attended the university, and a long line of NASA scientists and astronauts trained in aerospace and physics.

Graduate degrees include the M.A., M.S., M.B.A., J.D., and Ph.D. Research degrees follow a supervised laboratory or field model on a semester calendar, with assistantships common in engineering and the physical sciences. Boulder is a compact city; graduate life mixes campus, a pedestrian downtown, and mountain access, with Denver about 30 miles away.

In the Grad School Navigator directory, University of Colorado Boulder lists 151 graduate programs across 43 subjects: 70 master's programs and 71 doctoral programs, with the widest choice in education, languages & linguistics and communication, media & journalism. University of Colorado Boulder holds rank 134 in the GSN Overall University Ranking.