The school was established as a university in 1949, at which time the following institutions were subsumed into it; Nagano Normal School (established in 1873), Ueda Textile College (1910), Nagano Youths Normal School (1918), Matsumoto High School (1919), Nagano Technical College (1943), Matsumoto Medical College (1944), and Nagano Prefectural College of Agriculture and Forestry (1945).
