What college did Jay Gatsby attend for two weeks?

What college did Jay Gatsby attend for two weeks? Jay Gatsby attended St. Olaf College for two weeks.

This detail appears in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby, when Nick Carraway recounts Gatsby’s early life. Before becoming the mysterious millionaire known for lavish parties, Gatsby was James Gatz, the son of impoverished Lutheran farmers in North Dakota. He briefly enrolled at St. Olaf, a small Lutheran college in Minnesota.

Gatsby did not leave because of academic failure or a dramatic expulsion. He disliked working as a janitor to pay for his education and abandoned the college after only two weeks. That episode reinforces the novel’s portrait of Gatsby as intensely dissatisfied with his origins and determined to invent a new identity.

The college is sometimes confused with Oxford because Gatsby later tells people he studied at Oxford. That claim is connected to his postwar life and carefully constructed persona, while St. Olaf is the school he actually attended—and quickly left. St. Olaf College was founded in 1874 by Norwegian-American Lutheran immigrants.