2013 Annual Report: WICHE

WICHE was formally founded 60 years ago, in 1953, by Congressional compact. But it was an informal discussion between a university president from Wyoming and the dean of Colorado’s medical school a few years earlier that got the ball rolling. Like many states in the West, Wyoming was short on educational resources: for one thing, it had no medical school. Would Colorado be willing to hold a few slots in its med school for Wyoming residents? Colorado would. It reserved five slots for Wyoming residents, and another five for students from New Mexico, for the class of 1949. That act of regional resource-sharing was followed, in the same year, by a declaration by the Western Governors’ Conference at its meeting in Salt Lake City: “The Western Governors’ Conference believes that a cooperative plan among the western states is necessary and desirable and should be developed to provide more extensive facilities and training for the students of this region.”