Photo: Cristiano Tomás (CC BY-SA 4.0)
School data & stats
Outcomes
Cost
Community
Overview
Saint Mary's College of California sits in the Moraga hills east of Berkeley, a Lasallian Catholic college founded by the De La Salle Christian Brothers, combining a small residential campus with Bay Area access.
Academics
The college's signature academic feature is its Collegiate Seminar, a great-books discussion program required of all students across all four years regardless of major, anchoring the curriculum in shared close reading rather than lecture. Business, nursing, and the liberal arts are the largest majors built around that seminar core.
Campus & student life
The Moraga campus has Spanish mission-style architecture and a hillside, semi-rural setting that feels removed from the Bay Area despite a short drive to Oakland and San Francisco. Gaels basketball punches well above the college's size in national visibility, occasionally reaching deep into March Madness and giving the small student body a shared point of pride.
Getting in
Admissions is holistic, and because the Collegiate Seminar is discussion-based, the college looks for students comfortable with sustained reading and classroom debate, not just strong test scores.
Worth knowing
The four-year Collegiate Seminar requirement is a genuine academic signature, every student working through the same sequence of classic texts regardless of major, and is worth understanding for anyone deciding between Saint Mary's and a more conventional core curriculum.
Admissions
Deadlines (2026–27 cycle)
Applying
stmarys-ca.edu ↗High school coursework
Required4 years of English · 3 years of mathematics (algebra, advanced algebra, geometry) · 2 years of science (at least one laboratory) · 2 years of social studies (at least 1 year U.S. history) · 2 years of the same foreign language (16 units minimum total)
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