As a Jesuit university, Santa Clara is invested in the spiritual and religious lives of its Catholic students, offering campus ministries, leadership and scholarship opportunities, and other community building programming. The historical and cultural heart of Santa Clara University’s campus is a 200-year-old Mission church, originally dating to the Spanish religious colonization of Northern California in 1777. The Mission church is a unique feature among Catholic universities and provides a historical religious and spiritual home for the campus’s Catholic faculty, staff and students. Although the campus is officially welcoming to students from all faiths or no faith, and maintains an Interfaith Council, the large proportion of Catholic students, staff and faculty ensures that Catholic students in particular will be able to find community and religious growth opportunities in abundance.

The university is also heavily invested in its Business and Engineering schools, with nearly half of its degrees awarded annually from these two campus divisions. Business and Engineering students have access to interesting, unique degree programs and other academic opportunities through these schools, including Marketing, Management Information Systems, and Individual Studies (among others) at Leavey School of Business, and Bioengineering, Civil, Environmental & Sustainable Engineering, and Web Design & Engineering (among others) at the School of Engineering. And, because of its central location in Silicon Valley, SCU students have access to numerous career development opportunities at world-class tech firms just up the road. SCU may also be a good choice for students interested in taking a gap year, as the campus allows students to defer enrollment to pursue enriching non-academic experiences.

Other students who will thrive at SCU include those who are looking for an alternative to California’s large public universities. They are seeking a more intimate campus in a suburban community in Northern California that is still close to a vast metropolis. Class sizes are smaller, which bring closer relationships with professors, while still being in an ideal location to find internships. With its somewhat homogeneous population and religious affiliation, SCU provides an active social life for many students who want a more cohesive campus community than would be found in a large public university or dense urban setting.

Reliable rail service allows students to travel up the peninsula to San Francisco within an hour, but for the most part students will spend their time on or near their small campus in leafy, quiet, Santa Clara. Although San Francisco is known for dense fog and chilly summers, Santa Clara and the South Bay are very different, with about 300 days of sun each year and warm weather nearly year-round.