University Corporación Universitaria Rafael Núñez surges in the eighties by  initiative of Doctor Miguel Henriquez Emiliani, at a time in which the city of Cartagena and the Colombian Caribbean Region needed it, because the few superior education institutions in the city did not satisfy the demand generated by the demographic increase that the city and its nearby towns were undergoing. He then promoted the creation of a private institution of Superior Education in the city of Cartagena de Indias, seeking to become a reply to the academic expectations and the solution of the needs of the region. Consequently, with the relative backwardness in technological and scientific education that the Caribbean Coast was facing as to the other regions of the country, the main objective of the Institution was to contribute with the scientific, economic, social cultural and human development of the region.

The University began to function in the neighborhood of Manga in the city of Cartagena with the Pre-graduate Program in Preschool Education on April 6, 1987. Later, in February of 1991, the university is moved to the walled section of the city to a Colonial house located on Calle de la Soledad, where it opened the Pre-graduate Day Program in Special Education and the day and night Pre-graduate program in Public Accounting.  Three years later, in 1994, it opens the programs of Law and Surgical Instrumentation. These programs constitute themselves in a solution to the lack of some specific formation in the city. This way, the Pre-graduate Program in Preschool Education is the only one offered in the city of Cartagena at a professional level. As to the programs of Public Accounting, it is the second option that the city offers in Night School and Law program is the first one which is offered in the Night School, satisfying the needs of many people who cannot attend classes during the daytime.

The Surgical Instrumentation Program began at a technological level and it shortly turned into a professional level becoming the first option of this academic nature in the city of Cartagena and in the Department. The program satisfied the professionalization demand of the empirical instrumentalists who benefitted from the program to become professionals.

Later, in the year of 1997, the following academic programs were established: Bacteriology, Infirmary, Business Administration and Computer Science, being the last two the most successful in the night school.

The University slowly advances in its development process and continues creating and offering new pre-graduate programs in the only technologies in the region. The pre-graduate majors in Medicine, Odontology, Civil Engineering and Architecture began in February, 1999. The Technologies in Dental Mechanics, Aesthetics and Cosmetology, Pre-Hospital Attention began in 2008, respectively. The opening of these pre-graduate and technological programs and the strengthening of some areas of knowledge, such as health, among others, has allowed the institution to efficiently correspond with its ideal to contribute to the development of the communities in its environment and in the formation of a human being comprised with the social problems. 

During the years of existence of the university Corporación Universitaria Rafael Núñez, it has consolidated itself as an institution which promotes permanent innovating processes, at a pedagogic and curricular level, to be able to reply to the needs of professional formation of the Caribbean Region and fit in the new normative frame of superior education in the country.