Salt Lake City: Livability in the 21st Century

Based in Salt Lake City, nonprofit, online Western
Governors University (WGU) has grown into a nationally
recognized university in just over fifteen years. One of the
largest online universities in the country, the idea for WGU
began during a meeting of the Western Governors
Association in 1995. Its chairman, then-Utah Governor Mike
Leavitt, noted that distance learning technologies had the
power to tackle one of the western states’ most-pressing
problems: rapid population growth compounded by limited
public funds for educational services.
That discussion eventually led this bipartisan group of
governors to create Western Governors University, a first-ofits-kind
university with a mission “to improve quality and
expand access to post-secondary educational opportunities
by providing a means for individuals to learn independent
of time and place and to earn competency-based degrees
and other credentials credible to both academic institutions
and employers.”
Incorporated as a private, nonprofit university in 1997,
WGU has grown to a national university with more than
40,000 students and more than 26,000 graduates in all fifty
states, with more than 3,000 students and 2,500 graduates
living in the state of Utah alone.
WGU is the first exclusively online and nonprofit university
in the country that offers accredited competency-based
degree programs. Its more than fifty undergraduate and
graduate degree programs are available to adult learners
who need flexibility to achieve their educational and
career goals in the fields of business, kindergarten through
twelfth grade teacher education, information technology,
and health professions, including nursing. Tuition is
affordable at about $6,000 per year and has not increased
since 2008.
WGU has garnered attention and praise from the nation’s
leaders in higher education and public policy, including
Utah Governor Gary Herbert, U.S. Secretary of Education
Arne Duncan, and Bill Gates. Remarking on WGU’s innovative
competency-based programs, Secretary Duncan said,
“While such programs [like Western Governors University]
are now the exception, I want them to be the norm.”
In 2013, WGU was named to Fast Company’s list of The
World’s Most Innovative Companies, a recognition that
highlights the fact that WGU’s programs are developed with
input from leading employers and emphasizes the ways
WGU uses innovative technologies to improve learning
while keeping tuition low.
Now as a leading employer in the state; more than 830 of
WGU’s nearly 2,300 employees live in the Beehive State,
where the university’s national headquarters is located.
Helping adults return to college to fulfill their dreams of a
bachelor’s or master’s degree, WGU has become an integral
part of the educational landscape of Utah. What was once
just a blue-sky idea has turned out to be a visionary reality.
Additional information is available on the Internet at
www.wgu.edu.
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WESTERN GOVERNORS
UNIVERSITY
Based in Salt Lake City, Western Governors University
serves more than 40,000 students in all fifty states.
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