In response to the need for their sister teachers to hold baccalaureate degrees, in 1922 the sisters reorganized the Novitiate Normal School as Sacred Heart College and also commenced admitting lay women. The State of Michigan granted a charter to award two-year degrees to women to the new college in the same year. The site of the new college was transferred to the newly erected motherhouse of the Sisters on East Fulton Street, in the margins of Grand Rapids.[4] At some time between 1922 and 1931 it was renamed as Marywood College.[5] In 1931, it was reorganized as Catholic Junior College, transferred to a site on Ransom Street adjacent to the Grand Rapids Public Library, and became the first Roman Catholic college in the United States governed by women religious to become coeducational. Bishop Joseph G. Pinten of Grand Rapids instigated the reform to admit men alongside women.[4] At that time it awarded two-year degrees.

In 1939, Catholic Junior College added a third year to its curriculum. The college began awarding four-year baccalaureate degrees and was renamed Aquinas College in honor of St. Thomas Aquinas and its founder, Mother Aquinata Fiegler, OP, in 1940, but the articles of incorporation to legally effect the institutional change were not filed with the State of Michigan until 1941. In 1945, Mother Euphrasia Sullivan, OP executed for the college the purchase of the Holmdene Mansion, erected by Edward Lowe in 1908, and its arboreal lands, at 1607 Robinson Road, bordering East Fulton Street. The college relocated to the former Lowe estate where it is sited to this day. The North Central Association accredited it in 1946.




Aquinas College