Located in the heart of Silicon Valley, Santa Clara University blends high-tech innovation with a social consciousness grounded in the Jesuit educational tradition. We are committed to leaving the world a better place. We pursue new technology, encourage creativity, engage with our communities, and share an entrepreneurial mindset. Our goal is to help shape the next generation of leaders and global thinkers.
Santa Clara's undergraduate and graduate programs span from psychology to sustainable-energy engineering and from theatre arts to business analytics.
The University pursues its vision by creating an academic community that educates the whole person within the Jesuit, Catholic tradition, making student learning our central focus, continuously improving our curriculum and co-curriculum, strengthening our scholarship and creative work, and serving the communities of which we are a part in Silicon Valley and around the world. Santa Clara University will educate citizens and leaders of competence, conscience, and compassion and cultivate knowledge and faith to build a more humane, just, and sustainable world.
A Santa Clara education gives you more than a degree—it transforms the way you see the world and your place in it. Grounded in ethics and social justice, it empowers you to help find solutions to global problems and effect change in your community.
You'll take classes from professors who are as dedicated to teaching as they are to their research and scholarship. You'll learn from experience through community-based coursework, internships, and independent research, all while being immersed in the innovation, energy, and opportunity of Silicon Valley. We offer more than 50 majors, minors, and special law, medicine, and teaching programs. Our graduate programs span business, engineering, education, counseling psychology, law, theology, and pastoral ministries.
A solar-powered cooler that lets doctors deliver vaccines to desert-dwelling communities faster. A mobile mission control laboratory that tracks and manipulates government satellites. Water purification technology could save hundreds of lives. Santa Clara students and faculty work together, and independently, on groundbreaking research in many areas of human experience. From the School of Engineering's Frugal Innovation Hub to the Arts for Social Justice program, a Santa Clara education will give you the chance to do research and work that matters.
Santa Clara's three Centers of Distinction represent our Jesuit values' tangible expressions, encouraging the pursuit of knowledge in the service of humanity. The Centers create multiple points of interaction—here in the SCU community, throughout our communities, and around the world—and create opportunities to share our values and talents with society.
The Miller Center for Social Entrepreneurship's mission, recently renamed for Jeff and Karen Miller, focuses on accelerating global, innovation-based entrepreneurship in service to humanity. The Center helps social entrepreneurs realize their potential and become ready for significant investment.
The Ignatian Center brings together Santa Clara's most characteristically Jesuit programs to communicate and share our core values on and off-campus. The Center also sponsors neighborhood engagement and immersion projects throughout the surrounding communities and the world.
Highlighting the wealth of expertise on ethics at the University, the Ethics Center supports campus engagement with ethical issues. It brings the University's resources to bear on real-world problems faced by individuals and organizations in Silicon Valley and worldwide.
Maybe your sport of choice is volleyball, swimming, or lacrosse. Or do you love to camp or hike? If you are into it, SCU probably has it. If you are a serious athlete wanting to perform at a high level, you will find the challenge you seek in one of our varsity or club teams. Our world-class facilities speak to our Division I programs' quality, from the Sullivan Aquatic Center to the 45,000-square-foot Malley Fitness Center.
If you are looking to stay in shape, make friends outside of the classroom, or have some fun—our Campus Recreation programs offer a wide range of team sports and fitness classes. If your interests run more toward the "recreation" end of "sports and recreation," you will never run out of things to do (and climb, and hike across, and jump off of) in the Bay Area. Check out organizations like Into the Wild and the SCU Rock Climbing Club to find your path.
Since opening our doors in 1851, SCU has evolved and grown in ways that would have been unimaginable to our founders. However, through the years, we have remained faithful to the 475-year-old Jesuit tradition and our core values.
With the addition of the law and engineering schools, the College became "The University of Santa Clara" in 1912. The Leavey School of Business opened in 1926, and within a decade, it became one of the first business schools in the country to receive national accreditation.
In 1961, Santa Clara University admitted 75 female undergraduates, becoming the first Catholic co-educational University in California. In 1985, the University adopted Santa Clara University as its official name, and today SCU enrolls 9,000 undergraduate and graduate students from all over the world.
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