Entering Test Score Averages
SAT: 1243
GRE: 314
Students by the Numbers
148 Undergraduates
33 Graduate Students
Liberal Arts & Culture (BA, AA)
Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing (M.F.A.)
Master of Arts in Theology & Letters (MA)
Classical Christian Studies (M.St.)
The college was established in 1994.
Private, coeducational, Christian college offering associate, bachelor's and master's degrees.
New Saint Andrews is located on Friendship Square and Main Street in the historic Skattaboe Block (1891) of downtown Moscow, Idaho. Moscow is nestled in the rolling hills of the Palouse region in Idaho's picturesque northern panhandle, about 80 miles south of Spokane, Washington, and Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. It is 300 miles north of Boise, Idaho, the state capital, and is 300 miles east of Seattle. Moscow is a city with a population of approximately 22,000 and is home to Logos School, two Communion of Reformed Evangelical churches, Canon Press, and the University of Idaho. Washington State University is eight miles west in Pullman, Washington. For more information about the region, contact the Moscow Chamber of Commerce.
New Saint Andrews College is an independent, non-profit corporation governed by a self-sustaining, thirteen-member Board of Trustees.
New Saint Andrews College is an accredited member of the Transnational Association of Christian Colleges and Schools (TRACS). TRACS is recognized by the United States Department of Education (USDE), the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA) and the International Network for Quality Assurance Agencies in Higher Education (INQAAHE). The college is also registered with the Idaho State Board of Education.
New Saint Andrews College is an independent, non-profit corporation established by Christ Church, Moscow which is a member of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC). The college's trustees are all members of CREC churches. The college is a charter member of the Association of Classical & Christian Schools (ACCS) and a member of the Association of Reformed Colleges and Universities (ARCU). The college is also part of the University and College Accountability Network (UCAN).
Theological Perspective
The college stands in the Reformed and Presbyterian tradition of protesting catholics and affirms the great creeds of the Christian church throughout the ages: the Apostles' Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the Definition of Chalcedon. The college board of trustees, administration, and faculty all affirm the college's statement of faith, which offers a brief summary of the great reformational confessions of the 16th and 17th centuries, such as: the Westminster Confession of Faith of 1646, the Belgic Confession, the Canons of Dort, and the Heidelberg Catechism. The college believes that these historic confessions most fully and faithfully summarize the doctrine revealed in Scripture.
The college is blessed with a strong Christian faculty that includes some of the leaders of the classical Christian education revival, such as Senior Fellows Doug Wilson (author of Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning, The Paideia of God, and The Case for Classical Christian Education); Dr. Mitch Stokes (author of A Shot of Faith to the Head); and Dr. Christopher Schlect (contributor to Repairing the Ruins: The Classical and Christian Challenge to Modern Education).
The college has four senior fellows (three with a Ph.D.), and ten fellows (seven with Ph.D.s or highest degree in their field, and one completing his doctorate). In total, the undergraduate faculty includes 18 full-time and part-time members, with 13 or 72 percent holding a Ph.D. or the highest degree in their field, and one currently in the process of completing his doctorate.
The graduate faculty includes seven senior fellows or fellows who hold the highest degree in their field.
Student-Faculty Ratio
Undergraduate programs include an Associate (two-year program) and Bachelor of Liberal Arts and Culture (four-year program).
The college's graduate programs include a Master of Arts in Theology & Letters (M.A.) a Master of Studies and Graduate Certificate in Classical Christian Studies (M.St. & Grad.Cert.), and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing (M.F.A.).
Undergraduate tuition is less than half the national average for a private college. Additionally, students have the opportunity to lock in their rate for four consecutive years. The graduate level programs are also competitively priced.
The college is a non-residential campus, meaning that there is no on-campus housing by design and conviction. Students are responsible for their own housing arrangements. Most students board with local Christian families or share apartments with other NSA students. Costs for boarding with local Christian families vary considerably, depending on the living and meal arrangements. The college expects its students to be mature enough to live independently.
Students come from more than 28 states, Mexico, Canada, England, France, Ivory Coast, and Korea. The students hail from more than 20 different Reformed, Presbyterian and evangelical denominations. New Saint Andrews College limits its total enrollment to no more than 200 full-time equivalent (including both undergraduates and graduates, full-and part-timers). The college admits only a limited number of qualified applicants each year. The college's undergraduate enrollment target is approximately 50 or so new full-time matriculating students and a small number of part-time students each year. The college's annual graduate enrollment targets are 10 to 15 new M.A. students and 15-20 M.St. and Grad.Cert. low-residency students.
Admission Standards
The college seeks undergraduate and graduate applicants who are serious Christian students who are eager to pursue their studies in the context of a vibrant Christian community. They must be committed to sound doctrine, personal holiness, cultural reformation, and academic integrity. The admissions committees carefully evaluate an applicant's entire portfolio, weighing each element to understand the student as a whole person. The college seeks students who have a balanced life, academic interests, service to the others, involvement in their church and local communities, and appreciation of humor and the arts.
Retention & Graduation Rates*
Freshman retention averages 91%.
Graduation rates average 65% by the end of the sixth year.
Job placement statistics are not available and may not be as useful as those from vocationally-focused institutions, since the 'field of study' is a liberal arts degree. However, alumni survey results and data gleaned from publicly available information reflect favorably employment results for our graduates.
*These rates are calculated according to standard methodology, which uses results for first-time, matriculating, bachelor's degree-seeking students. The last four years of available data were used.
Graduates from NSA have gone into numerous career fields to become filmmakers, editors, teachers, doctors, pastors, lawyers, homemakers, business professionals, entrepreneurs, bankers, computer programmers, and salesmen to name a handful. The liberal arts prepare students broadly, which is why our alumni work in a broad range of fields. It is finally becoming a well-known fact that a liberal arts degree represents a robust education base for a variety of careers. (Link to connect.nsa.edu). But most importantly, NSA offers a degree not just from a Christian perspective, but on a Christian foundation. Therefore, our alumni are not only doing careers well, but they are also doing family well. The college surveys its alumni annually, and the resulting statistics show that the vast majority of our graduates are members in good standing at their churches. There is a less than 2% divorce rate among our graduates, and virtually all have their children in Christian education. While NSA alumni perform well in their fields, their career success is not the entire story. The real story is, that as a whole, they are living godly lives across the spectrum of career, family, and church.
1. Why is New Saint Andrews so small?
The college is small by design so that students may enjoy the close personal attention of the senior scholars and experience Christian community in tangible ways. The college limits each entering class to about 50 new full-time students. New Saint Andrews employs a small-group tutorial system centered on discussions of readings of the great literature of Western civilization. The college is also small because its founders and board of trustees believe that quality, integrity, and faithfulness are better preserved by maintaining close personal familiarity and accountability between the church, faculty, students, and community, and by rejecting the secular models of growth and giantism that have stumbled and undermined many formerly Christian colleges.
2. So many historically Christian colleges have been apostate longer than they were faithful, and more are faltering. How will New Saint Andrews maintain its faithfulness?
Unlike so many formerly or nominally Reformed and Presbyterian colleges today, New Saint Andrews refuses to bow the knee before the idols of our age: feminism, multiculturalism, liberalism, statism, giantism, and postmodernism. The college's trustees, administrators, faculty, and staff have an unwavering commitment—pledged in writing annually—to the historic Reformed faith and biblical worldview. The college concentrates its attention and energies on faithful Christian scholarship and Christian enculturation, not on coveting the world's respect or elevating athletics to a collegiate priority. The college refuses to build dormitories that encourage spiritual immaturity and remove students from familial accountability. Instead, New Saint Andrews encourages students to live with Christian families or to share rooms with other Christians in the local community under the spiritual oversight of the local church. The college purposely accepts no state or federal funds because we refuse to compromise our Christian testimony or to waffle on biblical principles by receiving any state or federal government funding or benefits. That also helps keep our costs considerably lower than most private colleges.
3. Why should I attend a Christian college like New Saint Andrews if I've already had a good Christian high school education?
Education at any age is never religiously neutral. A Christian primary and secondary education provides a good foundation, but college is usually where students build (or not) on that foundation. College will help sharpen—for good or ill—personal values and perspectives on the world that students have for the rest of their lives. Of course, many Christians can "survive" the secularism of non-Christian universities, but mere survival is not the same as learning to live and to think like a mature Christian. New Saint Andrews helps students develop a deep, biblically grounded worldview for any calling and makes it a delight in the process.
4. How many majors does New Saint Andrews College offer?
Actually, none. New Saint Andrews follows the classical, Christian tradition on this important worldview point and refuses to dilute its liberal arts program by either bowing to the vocational-technical idols of pragmatism or confusing vocational specialization with education or wisdom. We believe vocational skills are too important to leave to the academy. We also believe that colleges should never confuse vocational training with a biblically-grounded worldview education. New Saint Andrews therefore offers undergraduates a single, time-honored, integrated academic program in the classical liberal arts with two-year and four-year degree options. These two degrees, the Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts and Culture (the four-year degree) and the Associate of Arts in Liberal Arts and Culture (the two-year degree), emphasize the languages, literature, philosophy, history, and culture of Western civilization from a reformational Christian worldview.
5. If New Saint Andrews was established in 1994, how can its curriculum be "time-honored?"
The college's curriculum has its roots in the Middle Ages and the earliest universities established in the Christian tradition. The system of offering multiple majors at the undergraduate level did not begin until late in the nineteenth century when the Industrial Revolution's demand for well-trained, but not necessarily well-educated workers encouraged universities to become extensions of the factory. The first "major" was not offered in the United States until 1878, and it really was not until the turn of the 20th century when undergraduate specialization began to displace the classical liberal arts education that had been synonymous with higher education from the beginning. The great Christian universities of Europe and the United States were established with classical curricula to educate the whole person and to enrich the spirit in the pursuit of biblical truth, beauty, and goodness. When NSA developed its classical liberal arts curriculum, the college looked for inspiration from those great institutions including Puritan Harvard. It included subjects like: theology, rhetoric, natural philosophy, classical languages and math/science. Sound familiar?
6. Why should I pursue a classical education at the collegiate level after having a classical education at the high school level?
The same reason Christians have done so for hundreds of years—because we know only a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of all there is to know about Western civilization and the world God created. A classical Christian education is still the best, history-tested preparation for better understanding God's Word and the world in which He placed us. Many may be more highly trained, but few are better educated than those who receive a classical, Christian education.
7. Wouldn't I have more career options at a college with more specialized programs and majors?
Maybe. That is often the claim, but today most careers demand more than just an undergraduate degree in a specialized field. In fact, more and more employers recognize that narrowly-trained specialists are less adaptable to change and less likely to advance later into positions of leadership and management. The best place to specialize is at the advanced or graduate level, not the undergraduate level. Getting a classical, Christian education at the undergraduate level is one of the best ways to prepare one's self intellectually and spiritually to pursue advanced studies and specialized training in particular fields or careers.
8. What use is a liberal arts, classical education? Or, how will I get a job with a classics background from New Saint Andrews?
No undergraduate degree comes with a "union card" guarantee to a job. And even if it did, there is no guarantee that the job will still be there in two to five years. Only those who are broadly and deeply educated will be able to adapt well to changing circumstances and job markets. Liberal arts graduates are blessed with rewarding work every year, because employers in all fields know the long-term value of having well-rounded, clear-thinking employees. By worldly pragmatic standards, though, a liberal arts education is pretty useless. As useless as a flower bouquet or a beautiful song. As useless as the humanities and arts that enrich our lives and add beauty and biblical wisdom to our fallen world.
9. Does New Saint Andrews offer a distance education program?
New Saint Andrews is committed to a robust undergraduate liberal arts education in the classical, Christian tradition in the context of real Christian community. The same commitment applies to our graduate programs. At the same time, the advanced and specialized nature of post-graduate education appropriately allows for a higher degree of flexibility at the graduate level with regard to academic specialization, residency requirements, the means of delivering instruction to graduate students, and possible off-campus programs (e.g., on-site graduate studies, teaching sites, study centers, etc.). The college's distance education programs and non-resident means of instructional delivery (whether synchronous, asynchronous or blended) are consistent with the college's overall mission and academic goals and ensure that the content, quality, rigor, and student learning experiences are as comparable as possible with our in-residence programs and means of instruction. Currently only our 16-credit Graduate Certificate degree in the Classical Christian Studies program is available exclusively online. The CCS program's M.St. degree is a low-residency program requiring attendance in Moscow.
10. How does New Saint Andrews's tuition compare to other private colleges?
The college's tuition rate is among the lowest of any Christian college in the country, and with our optional tuition lock deposit, that rate can remain fixed for five consecutive years from the date of first enrollment. In a day when private-college tuition averages about $30,000 per year nationally, New Saint Andrews charges less than half that, or what many government-subsidized universities now charge. Not only is our tuition very affordable, but it is that way without compromising our Christian mission and vision by being dependent on government support. We refuse, on principle, to accept any government funding or "aid." Basically, our tuition rate provides the equivalent of a $15,000 scholarship (not a federally-financed student loan) for every four-year student, compared to the average private college tuition rate. Bottom line: New Saint Andrews offers a quality undergraduate education at very competitive rates, which makes it easier for you not to become a slave to debt and to graduate better prepared academically, spiritually, and financially to serve only one Master.