Founded as a business school in 1914 by Gertrude I. Johnson and Mary T. Wales, JWU enrolled 7,357 students across its campuses in the fall of 2020.

[7] The curriculum in the early part of the 20th century included bookkeeping, typing, shorthand, English, and mathematics.

[9] During the 1960s and 1970s, as Providence hotels and department stores fled to the suburbs, Johnson and Wales took the opportunity to expand its downtown presence.

In addition to the on-campus academic buildings and dorms, the university also operates hotels used as practical education facilities for the university's Hotel & Lodging Management, Food Service Management, and Culinary Arts degree programs.

The Wildcat Centers, fully renovated as of the summer of 2009, are NAIA and NCAA regulation size, and seat over 600.

In Denver the fitness center has tripled in size, and the locker rooms have increased from two to four, to accommodate game day needs as well as general use.

The Charlotte Wildcat Center is located adjacent to the Cedar Hall South dorm building.

Providence now features the Scotts Miracle-Gro Athletic Complex, located on the Harborside campus, which hosts baseball, softball, soccer, lacrosse and field hockey.

[17] This campus is home to several additional academic units: the Alan Shawn Feinstein Graduate School and the College of Culinary Arts.

Students in the culinary program are enrolled in five nine-day lab sessions, which take place Monday through Thursday each week.

The Providence Downcity and Harborside campuses currently offer membership in 15 fraternities and sororities as well as two social fellowships.

Deeply rooted in tradition, some of these organizations make up the origins of Greek life at the university and continue to exist and recruit new members without the sanction of the school.

The suit was redesigned and revealed at the annual family weekend on October 16, 2013, as an early start to the school's centennial year (2014).

During the 1980s and 1990s the official mascot at the JWU Providence campus was Griff the Griffin, a creature with the head of an eagle, body of a lion, and tail of a dragon.

As part of the North Miami campus's closure in 2021, on July 28, 2020, JWU published a memorandum that detailed the discontinuation of all sports seasons and competitions there.

The JWU Charlotte Lady Wildcats basketball team won the 2018 USCAA Division II National Championship.

[25] The Wildcats previously competed as an NAIA Independent within the Association of Independent Institutions (AII) of the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) from about 2005–06 to 2017–18; while its women's lacrosse team competed as an affiliate member of the Kansas Collegiate Athletic Conference (KCAC).

JWU Denver announced on February 21, 2017, that it would transition from the NAIA to NCAA Division III, a multi-year journey commencing with an "exploratory year" in fall 2017.