Reed College
Reed College is a private liberal arts college in Portland, Oregon, United States. Founded in 1908, Reed is a residential college with a campus in the Eastmoreland neighborhood, Tudor-Gothic style architecture, and a forested canyon nature preserve at its center. Reed alumni include 123 Fulbright Scholars, 73 Watson Fellows, and three Churchill Scholars.
History
The Reed Institute was founded in 1908 and held its first classes in 1911. Reed is named for Oregon pioneers Simeon Gannett Reed and Amanda Reed. Simeon was an entrepreneur involved in several enterprises, including trade on the Willamette and Columbia Rivers with his close friend and associate, former Portland Mayor William S. Ladd. Unitarian minister Thomas Lamb Eliot, who knew the Reeds from the church choir, is credited with convincing Reed of the need for the school. Reed's will provided for the gift, and Ladd's son, William Mead Ladd, donated 40 acres from the Ladd Estate Company to build the new college. Reed's first president was William Trufant Foster, a former professor at Bates College and Bowdoin College.Reed was founded explicitly as a reaction against the "prevailing model of East Coast, Ivy League education", its lack of varsity athletics, fraternities, and exclusive social clubs – as well as its coeducational, nonsectarian, and egalitarian status – intended to foster an intensely academic and intellectual college.
During the 1930s, President Dexter Keezer was concerned about the fraternization among male and female students and the consumption of alcohol by students. A large portion of the Student Council took the position that Oregon's liquor laws did not apply to Reed's campus. Policies restricting the ability of students from visiting the dormitories of the opposite sex were fiercely resisted.
After World War II the college saw its enrollment numbers dramatically increase as veterans began enrolling in the college.
The college has developed a reputation for the political progressivism of its student body.
Distinguishing features
According to sociologist Burton Clark, Reed is one of the most unusual institutions of higher learning in the United States, featuring a traditional liberal arts and natural sciences curriculum. It requires freshmen to take Humanities 110, an intensive introduction to multidisciplinary inquiry, covering ancient Greece and Rome, the Hebrew Bible and ancient Jewish history, and as of 2019, Ancient Mesoamerica and the Harlem Renaissance. Reed also has a TRIGA research reactor on campus, making it the only school in the United States to have a nuclear reactor operated primarily by undergraduates. Reed also requires all students to complete a thesis during the senior year as a prerequisite of graduation. Upon completion of the senior thesis, students must also pass an oral defense of ninety minutes related to the thesis topic and how the thesis relates to the larger context of the student's studies.Reed maintains a 9:1 student-to-faculty ratio.
Although letter grades are given to students, grades are de-emphasized at Reed and focus is placed on a narrative evaluation. According to the school, "a conventional letter grade for each course is recorded for every student, but the registrar's office does not distribute grades to students, provided that work continues at satisfactory levels. Unsatisfactory grades are reported directly to the student and the student's adviser. Papers and exams are generally returned to students with lengthy comments but without grades affixed." Students can request copies of their official transcript from the registrar. There is no dean's list or honor roll per se, but students who maintain a GPA of 3.5 or above for an academic year receive academic commendations at the end of the spring semester which are noted on their transcripts. Reed is singled out as having little to no grade inflation over the years; only ten students graduated with a perfect 4.0 GPA in the period from 1983 to 2012. Although Reed does not award Latin honors to graduates, it confers several awards for academic achievement at commencement, including naming students to Phi Beta Kappa.
Reed has no fraternities or sororities and few NCAA sports teams although physical education classes are required for graduation. Reed also has several intercollegiate athletic clubs, notably the basketball, rugby, Ultimate Frisbee, and soccer teams.
Academics
Reed categorizes its academic program into five Divisions and the Humanities program. Overall, Reed offers five Humanities courses, twenty-six department majors, twelve interdisciplinary majors, six dual-degree programs with other colleges and universities, and programs for pre-medical and pre-veterinary students. Its three most popular majors, based on 2023 graduates, were Psychology, Biology/Biological Sciences, and Computer and Information Sciences.Divisions
- Division of Arts: includes the Art, Dance, Music, and Theatre Departments;
- Division of History and Social Sciences: includes the Anthropology, Economics, History, Political Science, and Sociology Departments, as well as the International Affairs & Public Policy program;
- Division of Literature and Languages: includes the Chinese, English, French, German, Greek, Latin, and Ancient Mediterranean Studies, Russian, and Spanish Departments, as well as the Creative Writing and Comparative Literature programs;
- Division of Mathematics and Natural Sciences: includes the Biology, Chemistry, Computer Science, Mathematics and Statistics, and Physics Departments, as well as the Biochemistry & Molecular Biology, Mathematics-Computer Science, and Neuroscience programs, and
- Division of Philosophy, Religion, Psychology, and Linguistics: includes the Linguistics, Philosophy, Psychology, and Religion Departments.
Humanities program
Reed's Humanities program includes the mandatory freshman course Introduction to Western Humanities covering ancient Greek and Roman literature, history, art, religion, and philosophy. Sophomores, juniors, and seniors may take Early Modern Europe covering Renaissance thought and literature; Modern Humanities covering the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and Modernism, and/or Foundations of Chinese Civilization. There is also a Humanities Senior Symposium.
Interdisciplinary and dual-degree programs
Reed also offers interdisciplinary programs in American studies, Environmental Studies, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Chemistry-Physics, Classics-Religion, Dance/Theatre, History-Literature, International and Comparative Policy Studies, Literature-Theatre, Mathematics-Economics, and Mathematics-Physics.Reed offers dual-degree programs in Computer Science, Engineering, Forestry or Environmental Management, and Fine Art.
Rankings
In 1995, Reed College refused to participate in the U.S. News & World Report "best colleges" rankings, making it the first educational institution in the United States to refuse to participate in college rankings. According to Reed's Office of Admissions the school's refusal to participate is based in 1994 disclosures by The Wall Street Journal about institutions flagrantly manipulating data in order to move up in the rankings in U.S. News and other popular college guides. U.S. News maintains that their rankings are "a very legitimate tool for getting at a certain level of knowledge about colleges." In 2019, a team of statistics students recreated the formula used by U.S. News and were able to identify and quantify the penalty imposed on Reed. The students found the college to be ranked an estimated 52 places below an unbiased application of the U.S. News scoring rubric.Money magazine ranked Reed 512th in the U.S. out of 623 schools evaluated for its 2022 "Best Colleges for Your Money" edition.
Reed is ranked as tied for the 63rd best liberal arts college by U.S. News & World Report in its 2025 rankings, and tied for 23rd in "Best Undergraduate Teaching", tied for 23rd in "Most Innovative Schools", and tied for 174th in "Top Performers on Social Mobility".
In 2006, Newsweek magazine named Reed as one of twenty-five "New Ivies", listing it among "the nation's elite colleges". In 2012, Newsweek ranked Reed the 15th "most rigorous" college in the nation.
Reed College ranked in the bottom 6% of four year colleges nationwide in the Brookings Institution's rating of U.S. colleges by incremental impact on alumni earnings 10 years post-enrollment.
An episode of Canadian writer Malcolm Gladwell's podcast Revisionist History examines the flaws in the U.S. News system of university rankings. The episode features a project done by a Reed professor of statistics and her students to investigate the mechanics of the ranking algorithm, attempting to see if Reed's ranking had been purposefully devalued because the school refused to submit its information to U.S. News. Previous investigations by Reed students to re-create U.S. News's statistical ranking algorithm found that Reed's correct 2019 rank was #38 instead of its assigned rank of #90.