Arrupe College Expands

Father Steve Katsouros, SJ, saw a new opportunity to serve young people in Chicago and beyond with the founding of Arrupe College at Loyola University Chicago in 2014. Drawing on the same principles that have made Cristo Rey Jesuit high schools successful, the Arrupe model is now in a position to expand at scale, offering higher educational opportunities once unavailable to Cristo Rey graduates.

Since Fr. Katsouros transferred leadership of the Arrupe college network to Fr. Thomas Neitzke, SJ, in the fall of 2020, his dedication has not waned. In fact, the organization that Fr. Katsouros went on to found, the Come to Believe Network, is focused on replicating the Arrupe college model much like Fr. John P. Foley, SJ, replicated Cristo Rey schools after establishing the first one in 1996.

The Midwest Jesuits had seen Cristo Rey as an opportunity to grow the ministry within the Latino community on the southwest

side of Chicago, particularly in the Pilsen neighborhood, where the original school remains. Since then, Cristo Rey’s mission and impact has grown beyond the Jesuits’ wildest dreams. Today there are 38 Cristo Rey high schools across the United States. The innovative work-study model, integrating work in corporate environments with weekly school experience, has transformed students, families and communities.

For the past 26 years, hundreds of Cristo Rey students have achieved high school success, but as first-generation college students many have needed extra support to continue their educational journeys. Arrupe College at LUC has provided the bridge some of them have needed, offering a results-oriented, affordable, two-year associate’s degree model with wraparound services and a manageable debt load.

The program gives students the opportunity to enter a career with some college on their resume or continue at a four-year institution and graduate with a bachelor’s degree.

In addition to financial support, Arrupe students receive academic and social growth counseling.

Seeing the success of LUC’s Arrupe College, the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul Minnesota opened the second Arrupe model school, the Dougherty Family College in 2017. At least 10 more Arrupe model colleges are scheduled to open in the next five years. And the Come To Believe Network is in contact with even more, offering $30,000 design grants to fund feasibility studies for prospective universities. Currently, several schools are enrolled in the design grant process, which includes a visit to the original Arrupe College at LUC.

“The students come to believe they belong in higher ed,” says Fr. Katsouros, Come To Believe Network’s chief executive officer.

“They came to believe in themselves, and finally, we are seeing that universities are coming to believe that yes these students are very much worth the investment.”

The Arrupe model speaks directly to the Jesuits’ Universal Apostolic Preference of Journeying with Youth. All but 3% of Arrupe students identify as students of color. More than half of them graduate in two years with an associate’s degree. Three of every four Arrupe graduates who go on to a four-year program graduate with a bachelor’s degree in five years. Less than 25% of students graduate with debt.

Father Katsouros says an important aspect of the Arrupe model is that students are learning on a full university campus. They experience the wraparound services of campus life and the social growth of a new peer group with other university students, and there is value in that. They come to believe that this is where they belong.