Page "University of Northern Colorado" Paragraph 108

Founded in 1889 as the State Normal School, Northern Colorado met a vital need to train qualified teachers in the growing state of Colorado, which was then less than 15 years old.

More than a century and four name changes later, the institution has grown to become a Doctoral Research university.

At Northern Colorado's centennial in 1989, only four universities in the U. S. surpassed it in the total number of teachers trained.

All current Northern Colorado programs are clustered around an institutional mission devoted to teacher education.

Its early dedication to reaching the highest levels of educational excellence, coupled with the generation and dissemination of new pedagogical knowledge, earned Northern Colorado the name “ Columbia of the West .” In 1985, the Colorado Legislature took the unique step of designating Northern Colorado as “ the primary institution for undergraduate and graduate teacher education in the state of Colorado .”