Roanoke College is dedicated to enabling students to participate in a life-long pursuit of their callings.  As a college related to the Lutheran church, Roanoke College believes that each person has been given callings or purposes in life which are both a gift and an obligation.  While it is not always evident to students what their callings are, Roanoke College is committed to helping them discern and work toward those purposes.

The first calling that the college recognizes for its students is that they become the fullest and deepest humans possible.  The college helps them answer this calling primarily though its general education program, which introduces them to the accumulated wisdom of humankind in courses in the humanities and the arts as well as in mathematics, natural and social sciences.  It also encourages the care and nurture of one’s physical body.  Courses in the entire curriculum stimulate critical thinking, independent research and writing capacities as well as communicative skills.  Along with the formal curriculum, Roanoke offers a required co-curricular program that nurtures the values of civic and religious participation and service, in addition to spiritual, intellectual and emotional development.  The college is convinced that as students answer the call to become more fully human, they will at the same time respond to a second important calling, to become responsible citizens in their community, nation and the world.

A third calling assigned to humans is work.  Roanoke College supports students in their quest for meaningful work by offering a wide array of major and minor study programs.  Students are encouraged to specialize in a particular field so that they might find purposeful employment or entry into graduate study.  Roanoke believes that one of the most important ways we serve our fellow human beings is through our calling to work in the world.

Further, Roanoke College helps students integrate their callings to full humanity, citizenship and work on the basis of coherent visions of life as a whole.  As a church-related institution, it gives special place to the Christian humanist vision while respecting and learning from other perspectives.

Roanoke College features a faculty of teacher-scholars dedicated to fitting students for their callings.  It honors its Christian heritage and founding by Lutherans in 1842 while it welcomes students of all religious traditions.