Upsala College was founded at the 1893 annual meeting of the Swedish Evangelical Lutheran Augustana Synod in North America, known as the Augustana Synod—a Lutheran church body with roots in the Swedish immigrant community.The Augustana Synod placed emphasis on mission, ecumenism, and social service. Meeting at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois, the polity decided to open the college in Brooklyn, New York, in October 1893. The Synod chose a young minister, the Rev. Lars Herman Beck (1859–1935), as the college's first president. Beck, a Swedish immigrant to the United States, had received his Ph.D. from Yale University in the previous year and turned down a teaching position at Yale to assume the post at Upsala.
The name Upsala was chosen to honor both the historic Uppsala University in Sweden and the Meeting of Uppsala. That 1593 meeting—exactly 300 years before the founding of Upsala College—firmly established Lutheran Orthodoxy in Sweden after the attempts by King John III to reintroduce Roman Catholic liturgy.
On October 3, 1893, Upsala College opened in the Swedish Evangelical Lutheran Bethlehem Church in Brooklyn. The first day, Beck began instruction with 16 students. By the end of the year, Upsala had 75 students. Early instruction had been in Swedish as the student body largely consisted of Scandinavian immigrants. In 1897, the college moved to Kenilworth, New Jersey (formerly "New Orange, New Jersey") when the "New Orange Industrial Association" offered the young school fourteen acres of land. Upsala erected its first building on the Kenilworth campus in 1899.The college granted its first Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) degrees in 1905 to four students. By 1910, Upsala offered Bachelor of Arts in modern and classical languages, and Bachelor of Science (B.S.) degrees in Mathematics and Sciences, while offering a three-year college preparatory program, instruction in music for preparing "teachers of music, organist and choir leaders, and in general to afford its students a musical education", instruction in commerce and business to "train young men and women for a business career" and in stenography for students seeking "to fill positions as stenographers and private secretaries. While the college was identified by its connection with the Swedish Lutheran community, Upsala was the first college in New Jersey to admit women, and its student body welcomed students from many other nationalities and religions. In 1908, the student body consisted of 79 Swedes, 2 Finns, 1 Jew, 1 'American', 1 Chinese, 1 Korean, and 1 Persian
