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The hilltop is bracing for the annual spectacle Friday morning — Move-in Day at the College of St. Scholastica. That’s when a couple hundred fresh-faced 18-year-olds and their nervous parents will descend on Somers Hall with Target totes, Keurigs, and enough granola bars to last until Christmas break.
This is the Class of 2029 — a group that will be greeted not by nuns in habits, but by cheery upperclassmen waving orientation signs and promising that yes, the dorm Wi-Fi will work. (Most of the time.) The weekend is stacked with icebreakers and pep-rally style sessions designed to turn strangers into “Saints,” which in campus parlance means learning both how to study and how to survive winter on the hillside without face-planting.
St. Scholastica has been holding this welcoming ceremony for more than a century. The place started in 1912 with six students inside Tower Hall — a castle-like building that still lords over Duluth. The Benedictine Sisters who founded it probably didn’t envision majors in computer science, global sustainability, or exercise physiology, but here we are.
Today, the college draws about 3,400 students spread across six schools — Arts and Letters, Business and Technology, Education, Health Sciences, Nursing, and the Sciences. Translation: you can study Chaucer, chemistry, or corporate finance, then walk down the hall and bump into somebody training to be a physical therapist. They also crank out MBAs, social workers, nurses, and teachers, with plenty of graduate and doctoral degrees that you can tackle online if you’re juggling kids, jobs, and life.
St. Scholastica likes to say its curriculum is “rooted” in Veritas and Dignitas, which is a fancy way of telling freshmen they’ll be reading Plato, debating ethics, and sitting through a seminar that hammers home community, respect, and responsibility. In other words: don’t be a jerk, and remember you’re part of something bigger.
Outside the classroom, the campus isn’t exactly sleepy. They book more than 400 events a year — plays, concerts, guest lectures — plus the Spotlight series that brings in national names to remind everyone that Duluth is more than lakewalk selfies and Bentleyville lights. Clubs and orgs span everything from cultural identity to student government, with plenty of service work to keep the Benedictine spirit alive.
Recreation? They’ve got a 63,000-square-foot Burns Wellness Commons with tracks, courts, fitness studios, and a climbing wall. Outdoors, you’ve got Duluth’s endless trails and ski hills right out the back door. Athletically, the Saints field 22 NCAA Division III teams in the MIAC. Hockey, hoops, football, track, skiing, baseball, softball — name it, and they’re scrapping with St. John’s or St. Kate’s somewhere down the line.
Most of the newbies live on campus, where the housing is consistently rated better than most apartments you’ll find in town. Community is the buzzword — lots of built-in support systems that help freshmen survive homesickness, calculus, and their first below-zero walk to class.
And lest anyone think St. Scholastica is just a nice regional option, the rankings folks beg to differ. U.S. News puts them among the Best National Universities, Money magazine says it’s one of the “Best Colleges for Your Money,” and the Princeton Review keeps listing it among the Midwest’s best. They’ve also been tapped as a “First Forward Institution” for their work with first-generation students.
So Friday the luggage carts roll, the lobbies fill with chaos, and another batch of Saints starts climbing the hill. The Sisters who started it with six kids more than 100 years ago would probably smile at the sight — and maybe shake their heads at the climbing wall.
