St. Olaf College was founded within 1874 by a class action of Norwegian immigrant pastors & farmers, led by Pastor Bernt Julius Muus, as a coeducational, residential, four-month personal liberal arts college and is affiliated with a Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). Academics
St. Olaf enrolls about 3,000 students, & its academic divisions provide offer 45 graduation majors, including Decade teaching certifications, Twenty concentrations & Twenty pre-agent fields. This college offers pre-office preparation inside architecture, odontology, engineering, law, medicine, pharmacy, social function, theology, & veterinary medicine. A student/faculty ratio is 12:1, & virtually all classes use at times an typical enrollment of Xxi.

St. Olaf ranks third among liberal arts schools nationally (& 44th overall) in a total of National Merit Scholars, based on data from the Journal of Higher Education. 5 students earned Fulbright Scholarships inside 2005, & Xix develop received a award it used to be that Tierce years.

Based on data from a National Locate Council’s Survey of Earned Doctor's degree, St. Olaf ranks fifth among bachelor degree colleges in the total of graduates world health organizatiin last on to earn doctorial degrees. (This is a years 1991–2000.) St. Olaf was likewise foremost among baccalaureate colleges around math, foremost withinside religion & theology, fifth inside chemistry, seventh around foreign languages & sixth in bioscience as an undergrad provider of Ph.D.s.

St. Olaf is attached for Sixteenth among little colleges & universities nationally in a total of Peace Corps volunteers by the school.

Living at St. Olaf
Virtually all St. Olaf students (95%) reside on the campus located in Northfield, Minnesota, 40 miles (60 klick) south of Minneapolis/St. Paul.

Music at St. Olaf
St. Olaf's music program, founded by F. Melius Christiansen within 1903, is illustrious. Its band, choir and orchestra tour the continental U.S annually and have made several critically-acclaimed international tours. A St. Olaf Band was the number 1 Western college musical organisation to conduct a concert tour overseas after it travelled to Norway in 1906. A band is besides credited sustaining introducing a saxophone and the game of baseball to Norway. the orchestra was a 1st college orchestra ever to become a section of the Community Concert series.

A St. Olaf Choir, founded by Christiansen inside 1907 when a St. John's Lutheran Church Choir, is regarded when one of a premier a cappella college choirs in the United States. It hwhen toured Europe many days, likewise as China, Korea, and Australia, performing before heads of state & producing complete the xii recordings. A choir performs in the nationally-broadcast annual St. Olaf Christmas Festival along sustaining St. Olaf Orchestra & Five of the college's more choirs.

An significant section of St. Olaf's musical tradition is the competition of Early Morning Softball. To each one ensemble has a chance for higher at 6:15 & vent their incumbency higher agression on the other ensembles. For second-season theory students, this is a merely instance of year once it emerge from either the comfort of the music building couches to face the world. Uncalled-for to say, which are actually unremarkably the right & virtually all committed players, shopping for an excuse to skim a morning's hearing exercises to view a sun once again.

Athletics
St. Olaf College occurs as member of the Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (MIAC). St. Olaf occurs as traditional athletic & academic competition of its neighbor through town, Carleton College. A college song, Um Yah Yah, is inside 3/4 instance & has a ensuing lyrics:

"We come from St. Olaf, we sure are the real stuff.

Our team is the cream of the colleges great.

We fight fast and furious, our team is injurious.

Tonight Carleton College will sure meet its fate.

Um! Yah! Yah!" Notable Alumni
Ole Rolvaag, Author, Professor August Andresen, U.S. Congressman Arlen Erdahl, U.S. Congressman Harold Hagen, U.S. Congressman Chris "Rock" Torstenson, Presidential Advisor David Minge, U.S. Congressman

Miscellaneous
St. Olaf is mentioned in the works of Minnesotan F. Scott Fitzgerald (Jay Gatsby of "The Great Gatsby" attended briefly and worked as a janitor), in Garrison Keillor's radio program "A Prairie Home Companion" and on the television program "The Golden Girls".