Lasell University

Lasell University (LU) is a private university in Newton, Massachusetts, United States. It was founded in 1851 as a women's seminary. It became a college in 1932, a four-year institution in 1989, coeducational in 1997, and a university proper in 2019. The campus spans 54 acres and is located in the village of Auburndale.

Lasell offers bachelor's, master's, and graduate degrees in several disciplines. The university participates in NCAA Division III athletics, as well as having a student newspaper, a student yearbook, and a student-run radio station.

Lasell was founded in 1851 as the "Auburndale Female Seminary" by Williams College Professor of Chemistry Edward Lasell after he took a sabbatical from his job in Williamstown to teach at the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley, where the experience inspired him to invest more personally in women's education. He died of typhoid fever during the first semester, but his school proved highly successful as a first-rate educational institution and was soon renamed "Lasell Female Seminary" in his memory.

Its name later changed to "Lasell Seminary for Young Women", and in 1874, governance was given to a board of trustees and Principal Charles C. Bragdon. Bragdon further expanded the faculty to make Lasell renowned as a more academically rigorous institution, a prestigious school with a highly scientific approach to domestic work, art, and music. As an innovative institution, known for a radical approach to women's education at the time, Lasell also administered the Harvard exams and offered law courses for women.

Lasell also offered two years of standard collegiate instruction as early as 1852 and is cited as having been the "first successful and persistent" junior college in the United States. In 1932, the college changed its name to "Lasell Junior College", and the school officially began offering associate degrees in 1943. In 1989, Lasell adopted a charter to become a four-year institution (it no longer offers any two-year undergraduate degrees), and began admitting male students in 1997. Lasell also began offering master's degrees in 2002.

Lasell faced controversy in 2000 when seven former students sued and claimed that the nursing program, which had been discontinued in 1999, had been a "sham." The following year, the college built Lasell Village, an elderly education facility in which residents paid to live and attend classes. Although the college argued that the property was in line with its non-profit mission and exempt from property taxes, the city successfully sued the college for not paying property taxes for the property.

In September 2010, a settlement was also filed in Suffolk Superior Court stipulating that Lasell would have to pay $191,314 to over 1,000 students over a conflict of interest in their Financial Aid Department. The investigation was done by the office of Attorney General Martha Coakley.

The college explored merging with Mount Ida College, another liberal arts institution located in Newton, in February 2018. The reasons given for the proposed merger were to help keep tuition cost as low as possible and maintaining academic quality.