125 Years In, a Regional Comprehensive University Keeps Building What Its Region Needs
A local entrepreneur in Gunnison explains how day care challenges impact their recruiting and staffing. A city employee spends half his week translating for immigrant families because no one else in local government can. A young family decides whether they can afford to stay in the valley they grew up in, or whether housing costs mean they have to leave.
These aren’t hypotheticals. They’re conversations I’ve had this past year. And the question they raise isn’t whether the gaps are real. It’s what a university is supposed to do about them.
Western Colorado University turned 125 this year. We were founded in 1901 because the people of Gunnison needed teachers, so they donated land and planted trees to build a college that could address that need. That founding instinct of asking what a region needs, building it, and measuring success by what our students go on to do is how we still operate today. We’ve just broadened our aim since then.
Take child care. Local businesses told us the same thing: They can’t recruit or retain staff without reliable childcare, and there isn’t enough of it in this valley. We’re now working with Gunnison Valley Health to open a center with a curricular component, so our early childhood education students help staff it as part of their degree program.
Housing is the same problem from a different angle. We’re now partnering with the hospital on a faculty and staff housing project expected to open in 2027. Neither Western nor the hospital could pull this off alone. These efforts work because our two institutions have decided that solving a community problem works best when we treat it as our own.
Then there’s Western alum Ricardo Esqueda. He works for the city of Gunnison, translating and advocating for the immigrant families who live here, and he went through the Boettcher Foundation’s Doers and Difference Makers Fellowship along the way. Ricardo saw a gap in the system and is working to close it, which is exactly the critical thinking we hope a Western education produces.
That’s true more broadly of Western graduates. NFL running back Austin Ekeler came back to finish his degree after signing with the Chargers. Nancy Chisholm served as Western’s interim president in 2021 after building a career leading global Fortune 500 businesses. Dan Gibbs now oversees the water, wildlifem and land issues at the heart of Colorado’s Department of Natural Resources.
Our commitment to building what’s needed starts in the classroom. Colorado is short on engineers and computer scientists, so we built a school to train them. The Paul M. Rady School of Computer Science and Engineering is named for a 1978 Western geology graduate who went on to lead Antero Resources and made one of the largest gifts ever given to a public university in this state. He worked with us to create a school with a specific focus on statewide needs: aerospace and biomedical engineering.
The same logic drove our outdoor industry MBA, the first program in the country built exclusively around it.
Underneath it all is the Gunnison Valley Promise, a newer effort to make college more affordable for students who call this valley home. Built through strong community partnerships and donor support, it removes financial barriers. It invests in the future of our region, letting eligible local graduates attend Western with tuition fully covered starting this fall, so families can continue to build a future here, and the region doesn’t lose the talent it needs to grow.
Asking what Colorado needs, and then convening real partnerships to make it happen, is what a university built by its own community is supposed to do. It’s how institutions already working on the same problem end up working on it together, and it’s how we keep Gunnison Valley as a place where families can grow and thrive. In 1901, the town of Gunnison did just this, and 125 years later, we’re still operating from that same instinct.
Brad Baca is the 15th president of Western Colorado University in Gunnison, where he has spent more than two decades helping build an institution defined by access, purpose, and student success. Western is currently home to two Boettcher Scholars.
