There’s something beautiful about a college that doesn’t make its name known. The College of the Holy Cross has been doing its work since 1843 on a hill in Worcester, Massachusetts, above the city and with a view of the Blackstone River. A lot of people outside of New England have never heard of it. Part of the reason for this is that it’s a small liberal arts college that doesn’t have a top ten football team or a Silicon Valley pipeline that people want to talk about. The alumni list, on the other hand, tells a very different story.
Anthony Fauci went to and graduated from Holy Cross. So is Clarence Thomas, a justice on the Supreme Court. Five Rhodes Scholars, five Marshall Scholars, an Olympic athlete, and a Pulitzer Prize winner have all graduated from the college. It has consistently produced some of the most Fulbright scholars in the country, with 182 grantees to date. For a school with about 3,000 first-year students, those numbers are really hard to explain.
There was a lot of pressure to start the school. For many years, Bishop Benedict Joseph Fenwick, the second Bishop of Boston, tried to open a Catholic college in the city. Boston’s Protestant city leaders kept getting in his way. In 1843, he went 45 miles west to Worcester, bought land on Mount Saint James from a priest named James Fitton, and then started building anyway. His letters were almost excited as they talked about it. He talked about the view, the hill, and the “bold undertaking” of housing 100 boys for $125 a year. The first stone of Fenwick Hall was put in place on June 21, 1843. The school was open by October. Between the ages of 9 and 19, there were six students in the first class by November.
That rebellious, practical, and a bit scrappy energy that helped start the institution seems to have stuck around. In 1852, the main building caught fire and burned down. The state legislature turned down the petitions for a charter several times, in part because of anti-Catholic feelings stoked by the influx of Irish people during the famine. It wasn’t until 1865 that they got a permanent charter. It didn’t stop the place from getting bigger.
Holy Cross is a Jesuit institution, which means the educational philosophy here is shaped by a particular set of values: intellectual rigor, service, and the idea that a well-formed mind is more durable than a specialized one. Students choose from 64 academic programs across liberal arts disciplines, and the college allows for interdisciplinary and self-designed majors. The 174-acre campus still sits on that same hill Fenwick described, and on a clear day the view of Worcester below is exactly the kind of thing that makes a place feel intentional rather than accidental.
The financial picture is important to note. The college carries one of the largest endowments of any liberal arts college in the United States — a number that climbed past $544 million during the “Lift High the Cross” capital campaign that wrapped in 2006, having raised $216 million and exceeded its original target by more than $40 million. For the 2026–2027 academic year, tuition sits at $70,220, with total fees including housing and a meal plan reaching roughly $91,740. That’s not cheap, and it’s hard to pretend otherwise. However, Holy Cross has made a clear effort to close that gap through need-based and merit-based aid, and the financial aid office is known for really working with families to make the numbers work.
Pope Vincent D. Rougeau became president of Holy Cross in 2021. He was the first Black president and the first lay president in the school’s history. It was a quiet but important moment for a school with strong Catholic roots and a long history of Jesuit leadership. Things seemed to settle down after the change, which may say something about where the college is going.
It was also a debate about the mascot. Around 2018, the college started publicly thinking about whether to get rid of the Crusader nickname because it was linked to the historical Crusades. After a lot of thought, the leaders decided to keep it, making a clear distinction between how the college uses the symbol and the word’s darker historical meanings. There is still no word on whether that difference will last or if the conversation will come up again. But it was handled more thoughtfully than similar debates at other institutions.
Holy Cross joined the Patriot League in 1986 and competes in NCAA Division I. The athletic program is part of campus life without dominating it — which feels consistent with what the school is trying to be. A place where the education comes first, where the hill above Worcester is more than a backdrop, and where 180 years of history is treated less like a marketing asset and more like something to actually live up to.
