Boston College: What You Need To Know To Get In

Boston College has somehow catfished applicants into forgetting that it’s a Christian school. Notre Dame puts the religion front and center.

Touchdown Jesus. The Golden Dome. Priests everywhere. The word “Catholic” is not exactly hiding.

Boston College has pulled off a much better magic trick.

It sells Gothic buildings, hockey, Boston, finance bros, fall foliage, and a campus that looks like Hogwarts got a $4 billion endowment.

And somehow, every year, I talk to applicants who seem genuinely surprised when I remind them:

You know Boston College is a Catholic university, right?

Not historically Catholic. Not “founded by Catholics but basically secular now.”

Actively, intentionally, institutionally Catholic.

BC’s own strategic plan describes the university as “a Catholic university” that serves as a meeting place between faith and contemporary culture and “a Jesuit university” whose educational tradition emphasizes character formation alongside rigorous learning. More importantly, BC explicitly says these commitments will continue shaping the university and that it intends to remain faithful to its “Jesuit, Catholic educational and religious heritage.” 

This is not some decorative piece of school history.

It affects what you actually have to study.

Every BC undergraduate completes a substantial Core Curriculum. Among those requirements are two philosophy courses and two theology courses. 

Yes. Four courses.

Sorry, pre-meds.

And these aren’t “Religion in Star Wars” classes designed to technically check a box. For theology, students must complete six credits, ordinarily including one course designated Christian Theology and another in Sacred Texts and Traditions. Actual options include Engaging Catholicism, God, Self, and Society, The Hebrew Bible, The New Testament, and courses placing Christianity in dialogue with Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Chinese religions. 

BC’s Theology Department is wonderfully unsubtle about why. It calls theology “an essential feature of the Core Curriculum in a Jesuit, Catholic university” and says this reflects an “institutional commitment to the Roman Catholic tradition.” 

There is your dating profile.

You just had to scroll past the hockey pictures to find it.

And the Catholic/Jesuit identity isn’t confined to theology class.

BC’s official mission says the university is supposed to foster students’ “religious, ethical and personal formation” alongside their intellectual development, preparing them for service and leadership. 

That word formation matters.

Jesuit education isn’t just interested in what you know. It is unusually interested in what kind of person you are becoming, what obligations you have to other people, what gives your life meaning, and what you’re going to do with your education.

Which is why applicants should pay much closer attention to the supplements.

For 2026–27, one of BC’s actual essay prompts begins with a quotation from the late BC theology professor Father Michael Himes describing a university as a sustained conversation about “the great questions of human existence.” Another asks students to write about a tradition that strengthens their family or community. 

They don’t scream:

THIS IS A CATHOLIC QUESTION.

They don’t need to.

BC is testing for the same things its Jesuit mission emphasizes: reflection, community, meaning, responsibility, service, and engagement with questions bigger than yourself.

BC even describes its Jesuit philosophy this way: students should pay attention to their experiences, reflect on them, and then use their talents to “respond to the world’s needs.”

That is basically a cheat sheet for understanding what Boston College wants from its students.

And sometimes the connection between faith, academics, and service gets extremely literal.

BC’s PULSE program allows students to fulfill their philosophy and theology requirements through Person and Social Responsibility. The current course description says students examine community, suffering, and justice while completing 10 to 12 hours of community service per week. 

At another university, philosophy might mean reading Aristotle.

At BC, you might read Aristotle, discuss the moral obligations you have to society, and then get sent into Boston to actually do something about them.

That is extremely Jesuit.

None of this means you need to be Catholic.

BC explicitly says it welcomes students from many faith traditions, and its theology curriculum includes serious engagement with religions outside Christianity. 

You can be Jewish. Muslim. Hindu. Atheist. Agnostic. Someone whose last interaction with organized religion was eating a stale cookie after your cousin’s Bar Mitzvah.

BC is not secretly a seminary.

But you should be comfortable attending a university that believes education includes moral and personal formation, not just academics.

And from an admissions perspective, that distinction matters.

If your entire Why BC answer could be summarized as:

Boston + pretty campus + good business program + hockey + prestigious but slightly easier than Georgetown…

You have missed an enormous part of what makes BC, BC.

The Jesuit identity isn’t some weird historical footnote buried on the About page.

It’s in the Core. It’s in the theology requirement. It’s in the philosophy requirement. It’s in service programs. It’s in the university’s mission. It’s even hiding inside the supplemental essays.

Boston College tells you exactly what kind of institution it is. Applicants just keep getting distracted by Gasson Hall. If you apply thinking BC is simply “pretty Boston school with hockey,” you didn’t get catfished.

You didn’t read the dating profile closely enough.