Santa Clara University grew from a Spanish mission into California's oldest college
In 1851, with gold fever at its peak and California newly admitted to the Union, two Italian Jesuits opened a college on the grounds of a crumbling Spanish mission. Santa Clara College went on to award the state's first bachelor's degree and is now its oldest higher education institution still operating.
The site's story begins in January 1777, when the Franciscan Junípero Serra founded Mission Santa Clara, eighth of 21 Alta California missions, on the land of the Ohlone people. Floods and an 1818 earthquake forced the church to be rebuilt and moved several times. After Mexico secularised mission lands in the 1830s the buildings decayed, and in 1851 the bishop of Monterey offered the site to Jesuits John Nobili and Michael Accolti on condition that they start a college.
Santa Clara College was the first in California to open its doors to students. It conferred the state's first bachelor's degree on Thomas I. Bergin in 1857 and its first graduate degree two years later, and in 1871 the California Historical Society was founded on its campus. In 1912 it spun off its high school, added law and engineering, and became the University of Santa Clara; the business school followed in 1923.
In 1961 it admitted women, the first Catholic university in California to teach men and women together. The name changed to Santa Clara University in 1985, partly to avoid confusion with the University of Southern California. A major road that cut through campus was rerouted in 1989, and the grounds now span more than 106 acres, straddling the line between Santa Clara and San Jose. The mission church, rebuilt after a 1925 fire, remains the campus centrepiece.
Recent decades brought a large library, a new law building and, in 2022, the $300 million Sobrato Campus for Discovery and Innovation, one of the country's largest STEM teaching facilities. In May 2026 the university announced a medical school with Sutter Health, backed by a $175 million gift from alumni Mark and Mary Stevens, the Bay Area's first new medical school in over a century.
Source: Santa Clara University
