The University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder, CU, or Colorado) is a
public
In public relations and communication science, publics are groups of individual people, and the public (a.k.a. the general public) is the totality of such groupings. This is a different concept to the sociological concept of the ''Öffentlichkei ...
research university
A research university or a research-intensive university is a university that is committed to research as a central part of its mission. They are the most important sites at which knowledge production occurs, along with "intergenerational kno ...
in
Boulder, Colorado
Boulder is a home rule city that is the county seat and most populous municipality of Boulder County, Colorado, United States. The city population was 108,250 at the 2020 United States census, making it the 12th most populous city in Color ...
. Founded in 1876, five months before
Colorado
Colorado (, other variants) is a state in the Mountain West subregion of the Western United States. It encompasses most of the Southern Rocky Mountains, as well as the northeastern portion of the Colorado Plateau and the western edge of t ...
became a
state, it is the
flagship university of the
University of Colorado
The University of Colorado (CU) is a system of public universities in Colorado. It consists of four institutions: University of Colorado Boulder, University of Colorado Colorado Springs, University of Colorado Denver, and the University of Co ...
system. CU Boulder is a member of the
Association of American Universities, a selective group of major research universities in North America, and is
classified among
R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity. In 2021, the university attracted support of over $634 million for research and spent $536 million on research and development according to the
National Science Foundation
The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National I ...
, ranking it 50th in the nation.
The university consists of nine colleges and schools and offers over 150 academic programs, enrolling more than 35,000 students as of January 2022.