Metropolitan State University of Denver (MSUD) Introduction and Academics

Introduction

Founded in 1965, The Metropolitan State University of Denver, often called Metro State, is a large public liberal arts school that caters to commuters and provides no on-campus housing. Located in downtown Denver at its 127-acre Auraria campus there are also two more locations referred to as MSU Denver North located in Northglenn and MSU Denver South located in Greenwood Village. Formerly known as Metropolitan State College of Denver, the school recently went through a name change and added the term University to its name which better reflects the type of education offered to students.

Bachelor’s and master’s degrees are offered along with certificates. More than 24,000 students are enrolled and 80 percent of the college’s alumni live and work in the city of Denver and the state of Colorado.

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Information Summary

Ranks 20th in Colorado and 1501st overall. See the entire top 2,000 colleges and universities list
Overall Score (about)	72.9
Total Cost On-Campus Attendance	$9,066
Admission Success rate	N/A
ACT / SAT 75%ile scores	23 / 1110
Student Ratio Students-to-Faculty	23 : 1
Retention (full-time / part-time)	65% / 51%
Enrollment Total (all students)	20,192

Academics

Metro State offers 56 majors of study, 82 minors, and 36 certificate programs. Students can earn bachelor of science, bachelor of music, bachelor of arts and bachelor of fine arts degrees, along with master’s degrees in professional accountancy, teacher education, and social work. The campus offers three undergraduate schools — Business; Letters, Arts and Sciences; and Professional Studies.

Class sizes are small and average 19 students, and the teacher to faculty ratio is 22 to one. The college’s most popular majors are management, biology, criminal justice and criminology, psychology, art, accounting, English, marketing, human performance and sport, and history. The average freshman retention rate, an indicator of student satisfaction, is 66 percent.

To meet the needs of its students, the college holds day, night and weekend courses at the Auraria Campus and at its two suburban satellite campuses. The College also offers an extensive number of online courses. In fact, students in the general studies program can take those classes entirely online and 17 majors can be completed through a combination of online, weekend and evening courses.

The Center for Urban Education supplies well-qualified teachers for Denver’s high-need middle and high schools.The program is a semester-long experience in which students combine coursework in leadership studies with workshops, conferences, mentoring, and service learning. Students must apply for admission into the Urban Education program.

Students and community members can enroll in the Center for Innovation which provides programs for those interesting in becoming entrepreneurs. Future and current business owners can take part in classes about franchise ownership and receive coaching and advising.

The college is also proud of its off-campus Center for Visual Art in the Santa Fe Arts District, which offers exhibits from national and international artists. The CVA also serves as an art laboratory for students.

The campus has an aviation-related facility that contains an array of flight simulators designed to train students in flying aircraft. The college also plans to integrate air traffic control services and training into its flight simulation training. The Metro State Precision Flight Team is a member of the National Intercollegiate Flying Association, which allows university flight teams to compete in various categories of piloting. Majors offered include professional pilot and aviation airport management studies.

Students who need academic support will find it in the college’s advising program, its assessment and testing program, immigrant services, English as a Second Language programs, intervention assistance, a tutoring center, and writing center. Students with disabilities can get assistance at the Access Center for Disabilities and Adaptive Technology.

The bookstore provides students with textbooks, gifts, computers and software, and the Auraria Library provides a wealth of resources for research, an extensive archive of historical materials, and an online “Ask the Librarian” chat box for students with questions.

Most Popular Fields of Study

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Admissions

Resident and non-resident freshman must meet Metro State’s Colorado Commission on Higher Education index score of 76 or higher to be considered for admission. And students with scores lower than a 91 are encouraged to submit letters of recommendation and a personal statement to bolster their changes of admittance.

In addition, the school requires applicants to have attained a minimum ACT English subscore of 18, and a minimum reading subscore of 17, or an SAT verbal score of 440 or higher. Incoming students must also have completed all coursework as required by Higher Education Admissions Requirements regulations. Applicants who have not completed all the criteria will be considered for provisional admission.

Students over the age of 20 who have a GED or high school diploma are also admitted, regardless of their prior academic record.

If you’d like to visit the campus, tours are offered Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at 10 a.m. and Tuesdays and Thursdays at 2 p.m. Tours are led by current students and last 60 to 90 minutes.

Financial Aid

More than $95 million in scholarships, grants, loans and work-study opportunities are awarded each year to students.

Scholarships include the Gene Amole Scholarship for journalism students with a minimum grade point average of 3.0, the Roy and Shirley Durst Scholarship awarded to students of financial need with a grade point average of 3.5 or higher, the Reisher Scholars award for continuing education students, and others.

The school also participates in the federal and Colorado work-study programs, which typically award $5,000 a year to motivated students who are willing to work during the school year. And the Internship Center places students in 1,000 internships at 600 local businesses each year, which can also decrease the cost of tuition.

Student Financial Aid Details

Ranks 5933rd for the average student loan amount.
Secrets to getting the best scholarships and financial aid in Colorado.

Students

This is a non-residential commuter’s school, so there are no residence halls on campus. The college does, however, provide some students with local housing and rental information as a convenience.

The student body is diverse, with the highest number of students of color — about 28 percent — of all Colorado’s four-year colleges. In fact, according to the university, one in every three African Americans and one in four Latinos in Colorado who are seeking a bachelor’s degree are enrolled here. In addition, the college offers a rich mixture of age groups because of its accessibility to adult learners, although the median age of its students is 23.

The campus includes numerous wireless Internet hot zones and there are 32 computer labs and 550 computers available to students.

Although they don’t live in traditional on-campus fraternity and sorority houses, the school is home to six registered fraternities and sororities, including three Latino-based Greek organizations and one Greek organization for African-American students.

There are plenty of student clubs and organizations on campus, including a feminist alliance, a scholars club, a linguistics club, a flight team, and a marching band. They also have its own student-produced video news program, The MetReport; a student newspaper, The Metropolitan; and Metrosphere, a student-produced literary and arts magazine.

The college also runs the Metro State Student Travel Program, which provides grants to help fund the cost of transportation, registration and lodging for individual students or student groups who want to attend regional and national educational conferences. Individual students or student groups may apply for funding once each academic year. Individual grants of up to $650 and group grants of up to $2,000 are made available to qualifying applicants.

Student Enrollment Demographics

Student Graduation Demographics

Athletics

The school is a member of NCAA Division II and competes in the Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference. The college sponsors 13 intercollegiate sports played by 200 student-athletes.

The Roadrunners men’s sports are baseball, basketball, cross country, soccer, tennis, and track and field. Women’s sports are basketball, cross country, soccer, softball, tennis, track and field, and volleyball.

Club sports are also extremely popular and give non-athletes and less traditional athletes a chance to compete. They include baseball, cheer and dance, cycling, fencing, fishing, football, hip-hop dance, men’s ice hockey, inline hockey, lacrosse, martial arts and self-defense, rock climbing, squash, swimming and diving, taekwondo, ultimate Frisbee, and men’s volleyball.

The university has won 32 Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference tournament championships and 28 regular season championships. The volleyball team has made nine consecutive NCAA postseason appearances and women’s soccer has made seven consecutive appearances. Men’s basketball has reached the NCAA tournament in 11 of the past 12 seasons.

The men’s basketball team won national titles in 2000 and 2002, and its women’s soccer team won in 2004 and 2006.

In 2010, the College’s athletic teams capped off their most successful year in school history by finishing 13th in the nation among the Division II schools of the NCAA. That same year, the women’s softball team played for the first time in the Collegiate World Series.

The campus also offers its students use of a physical education center that features cardio equpment, circuit training, free weights, a climbing wall, a fitness loft with classes, an indoor cycling studio, and three courts for basketball, volleyball, badminton and other indoor sports. There is also a six-lane competitive swimming pool with a diving well.

Metropolitan State University of Denver