Saint Mary's Honored in 2013 "Colleges That Change Lives"
Saint Mary's College of California has been honored in the prestigious 2013 edition of "Colleges That Change Lives: 40 Schools That Will Change the Way You Think About Colleges." The newly revised guidebook praised Saint Mary's educational approach as "powerful" and "a mechanism of change."
"Colleges That Change Lives" is widely recognized as essential reading for college-bound students, and by discerning parents, to identify colleges that offer life-transforming educational experiences. Saint Mary's is the only Catholic college, and the only California college, in the history of the 40-school list. "Colleges That Change Lives" says the academic and spiritual mission of Saint Mary's is fundamental to its success with students, noting that "the Lasallian tradition fuels the college's perspective on teaching and learning: Education is powerful, and it comes with a deep responsibility to improve the world.”
An excerpt from the chapter on Saint Mary’s:
St. Mary's is a Catholic college run by the Christian Brothers, a lay teaching order that has its roots in seventeenth-century France. The college's educational principles grow from the writings and teachings of St. John Baptist de La Salle, who worked doggedly to establish schools for poor and working-class children.
The Lasallian tradition fuels the college's perspective on teaching and learning: Education is powerful, and it comes with a deep responsibility to improve the world. It's a mechanism of change.
...St. Mary's doesn't have the typical private-college crowd. One-third of students are Pell eligible. About half are ethnic minorities. Slightly more than half of students are Catholic, but the college welcomes students of any (or no) religious background.
Everyone takes the Collegiate Seminar, a four-semester series of intimate classes that covers major works of Western civilization, starting with Homer and Aristotle.... The course asks big questions: What is goodness? What is death? Does evil have to exist? Students learn to read carefully, draw sharp conclusions, listen to other people, and disagree civilly.
About 55 percent of St. Mary's students travel abroad, many of them during Jan Term.... In 2011 courses traveled... to Haiti to perform direct earthquake relief work and produce multimedia projects; to South Africa to examine its culture and nature; to Israel, Palestine, and Jordan to examine the history, religion, and politics of the Holy Land.
Professors willing to trek around the world with students are rare, and St. Mary's attracts the precious few whose ideas about education align with the college's mission. Of these, 95 percent have terminal degrees in their fields, many of them earned at some of the country's most renowned graduate schools: Princeton, Stanford, Brown, Harvard, and Berkeley.
Another thread running through the students' comments is love for their community and a fierce sense of school spirit, bolstered by little St. Mary's Division I athletics. "It brings us all together," says a sophomore…. "There's a sense of community on campus anyway, ...just because we all attend St. Mary's, but that's blown up and magnified when we start cheering for our teams."