Retrospective

Students

During this time, Boston College has steadily enhanced its academic reputation, enabling the University to compete for the best and most accomplished high school students worldwide. Accordingly, between 1996 and 2026, the number of applicants to Boston College increased from 16,501 to 41,898, while the percentage of accepted BC students fell from 41 percent in 1996 to approximately 13 percent today. The average SAT scores increased steadily from 1248 to 1471. In addition, AHANA student enrollment rose from 17 percent to 38 percent. 

BC students have won hundreds of prestigious academic awards, including Rhodes, Marshall, Goldwater, and Churchill scholarships, and Fulbright grants. In recognition of its academic reputation and commitment to meeting the full demonstrated financial need of its undergraduate students, Boston College accepted an invitation to join QuestBridge, a select, nonprofit program that helps high-achieving, low-income students gain admission and full scholarships to the nation’s best colleges and universities.

Faculty

The University has expanded its full-time faculty during the past 30 years by more than 300, to its present total of 932. BC faculty, which include a Nobel laureate and two MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship recipients, have earned multiple Fulbright and Beckman fellowships and NIH and NSF grants within BC’s nine schools and colleges.  In recognition, BC benefactors have established nearly 200 endowed faculty funds, currently valued at $320 million, which support more than 400 named faculty positions.

BC’s faculty research strengths also helped the University to be named an R1 research institution by the Carnegie Foundation, the highest research designation in higher education, and led the way for the establishment of the Schiller Institute for Integrated Science and Society, which features academic programs in integrated science, data analytics, design thinking, and public health. In 2021, in response to demand, BC broke with 150 years of liberal arts tradition when it established an Engineering Department in the Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences, offering an undergraduate degree in human-centered engineering.  Overall, since 1996, annual sponsored research at Boston College has risen from $18 million to $84.8 million.

Campus and Facilities 

The Boston College campus has vastly expanded during the past 30 years, with BC acquiring 65 acres across Commonwealth Avenue from the Archdiocese of Boston between 2004 and 2007 in what is now the Brighton Campus. The University added an additional 79 acres in Dover for the Connors Center in 2004, and eight acres at 300 Hammond Pond Parkway in Chestnut Hill for administrative office space in 2018.  Most recently, it added 50 acres on what is now the Brookline Campus of Boston College through a 2020 integration with Pine Manor College, and 24 acres from the purchase of the former Mt. Alvernia High School campus in Newton, which will become the home of the BC School of Social Work on the Newton East Campus in 2027.  Through ongoing campus beautification efforts, Boston College is widely considered to be one of the nation’s most beautiful college campuses. 

BC also unveiled two major science facilities during the past three decades, a renovated Higgins Hall for biology and physics in 2001, and 245 Beacon Street, a 159,000 square-foot facility for integrated science, entrepreneurship, innovation, and engineering in 2022. In addition, the University opened Stokes Hall, a 199,000 square-foot humanities building in 2012, and the 244,000 square-foot Margot Connell Recreation Center in 2019.

This summer, the University’s Catholic Religious Archives will open on the Brighton Campus to assist in the collection, preservation, and study of institutional records and documents belonging to Catholic religious orders and congregations in the United States and Canada. BC also recently announced a record-breaking estate gift that will help enable the renovation of Carney Hall to become a hub of the social sciences—including the departments of psychology and neuroscience, sociology, political science, and economics—and home to the Office of Campus Ministry, solidifying the University’s commitment to a rigorous Jesuit, Catholic, liberal arts education.

Alumni/Benefactor Support

During the Leahy presidency, Boston College conducted two successful capital campaigns that raised $441 million and $1.605 billion, respectively, and set ambitious strategic goals for the University that included becoming the national leader in the liberal arts and formative education, and the world’s leading Catholic university and theological center. In September of 2023, BC announced Soaring Higher, a $3 billion campaign to support financial aid, academics, and student life, which has raised $2.25 billion to date. 

Annual contributions to Boston College also increased significantly during this time, from $24 million to $260 million, and the endowment has grown from $750 million to more than $4.9 billion today. Undergraduate need-based financial aid has risen from $35 million to $197.7 million annually, with BC being one of approximately two dozen private universities in the United States that is need blind in admission and meets the full demonstrated need of all accepted students.