Augsburg College

Augsburg University is a private liberal arts college in Minneapolis, Minnesota that is affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Upon its founding in 1869, it was a Norwegian-American Lutheran seminary known as Augsburg Seminarium. Its first college class began in the fall of 1874. Today, the university enrolls approximately 3000 undergraduate students and 800 graduate students. The school is known for its emphasis on service learning; volunteering in the community is both an instructional strategy and a required part of a student's coursework. In 2010 Augsburg was one of the six higher education institutions to receive the Presidential Award for Community Service, sponsored by the Corporation for National and Community Service. In 2017 the name of the school changed from Augsburg College to Augsburg University.

Augsburg was founded as a seminary by Norwegian Lutherans. It was named after the Augsburg Confession of 1530, the primary confession of faith presented by Lutherans in Augsburg, Germanyin and contained in the Book of Concord of 1580. Augsburg Seminarium opened in September 1869, in Marshall, Wisconsin, and moved to Minneapolis in 1872 and the name changed to The Norwegian Danish Evangelical Lutheran Augsburg Seminary after the church body that sponsored the school. Undergraduate classes first began in the fall of 1874 with the first class graduating in the spring of 1879.