Swarthmore College
Swarthmore College is a private liberal arts college in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, United States. Founded in 1864, with its first classes held in 1869, Swarthmore is one of the earliest coeducational colleges in the United States. It was established as a college under the Religious Society of Friends. By 1906, Swarthmore had dropped its religious affiliation and officially became non-sectarian.
Swarthmore is an exclusively undergraduate four-year institution. It is a member of the Tri-College Consortium, a cooperative academic arrangement with Bryn Mawr College and Haverford College. Swarthmore is also affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania through the Quaker Consortium, which allows students to cross-register for classes at all four institutions.
Swarthmore's alumni include six Nobel Prize winners, thirteen MacArthur Foundation fellows, as well as winners of the Tony Awards, Grammy Awards, Academy Awards, Emmy Awards, and the Guggenheim Fellowship.
History
The name "Swarthmore" has its roots in early Quaker history. In England, Swarthmoor Hall near the town of Ulverston, Cumbria,, was the home of Thomas and Margaret Fell in 1652 when George Fox, fresh from his epiphany atop Pendle Hill in 1651, came to visit. The visitation turned into a long association, as Fox persuaded the couple of his views. Swarthmore was used for the first meetings of what became known as the Religious Society of Friends.The college was founded in 1864 by Deborah Fisher Wharton, along with her industrialist son, Joseph Wharton, together with a committee of members of the Hicksite Yearly Meetings of Philadelphia, New York and Baltimore. It is the only college founded by the Hicksite branch of the Society of Friends: previous Quaker institutions, like nearby Haverford College, were Orthodox in their founding history. Swarthmore held its first classes in 1869 and Edward Parrish was the first president. Lucretia Mott and Martha Ellicott Tyson were among those Friends who insisted that the new college of Swarthmore be coeducational. Edward Hicks Magill, the second president, served for 17 years. His daughter, Helen Magill,, was in the first class to graduate in 1873; in 1877, she was the first woman in the United States to earn a Ph.D.
In the early 1900s, the college had a major collegiate American football program during the formation period of the soon-to-be nationwide sport and an active fraternity and sorority life. The 1921 appointment of Frank Aydelotte as president began the development of the school's current academic focus, particularly with his vision for the Honors program based on his experience as a Rhodes Scholar.
During World War II, Swarthmore was one of 131 colleges and universities nationally that took part in the V-12 Navy College Training Program, which offered students a path to a U.S. Navy commission.
Wolfgang Köhler, Hans Wallach, and Solomon Asch were noted psychologists who became professors at Swarthmore, a center for Gestalt psychology. Both Wallach, who was Jewish, and Köhler, who was not, had left Nazi Germany because of its discriminatory policies. Köhler came to Swarthmore in 1935 and served until his retirement in 1958. Wallach came in 1936, first as a researcher, also teaching from 1942 until 1975. Asch joined the faculty in 1947 and served until 1966, conducting his noted conformity experiments at Swarthmore.
The 1960s and 1970s saw the construction of new buildings: Sharples Dining Hall in 1964, Worth Health Center in 1965, the Dana/Hallowell Residence Halls in 1967, and Lang Music Building in 1973. They also saw a 1967 review of the college initiated by President Courtney Smith, a black protest movement, in which African-American students conducted an eight-day sit-in in the admissions office in 1969 to demand increased black enrollment – the sit-in abruptly ended after Smith's death from a heart attack on January 16 – and the establishment of both a Black Cultural Center and Women's Resource Center. The Environmental Studies program and the Intercultural Center were established in 1992, and in 1993 the Lang Performing Arts Center was opened; the Kohlberg Hall was then established in 1996.
In 1999, the college began purchasing renewable energy credits in the form of wind power, and in the 2002–2003 academic year it constructed its first green roof. In 2008, Swarthmore's first mascot, Phineas the Phoenix, made its debut.
Academics
Swarthmore's Oxbridge tutorial-inspired Honors Program, introduced in 1922, allows students to take double-credit seminars from their third year, and they often write honors theses. Seminars are usually composed of four to eight students. Students in seminars will usually write at least three 10-page papers per seminar, and often one of these papers is expanded into a 20–30-page paper by the end of the seminar. At the end of their final year, Honors students take oral and written examinations conducted by outside experts in their field. Usually one student in each discipline is awarded "Highest Honors"; others are either awarded "High Honors" or "Honors"; rarely, a student is denied Honors altogether by the outside examiner. Each department usually has a grade threshold for admission to the Honors program.Uncommon for a liberal arts college, Swarthmore has an engineering program in which, at the completion of four years' work, students are granted a B.S. in engineering. Other notable programs include minors in peace and conflict studies, cognitive science and interpretation theory.
Swarthmore has an undergraduate student enrollment of 1,620 and 187 faculty members, for a student-faculty ratio of 8:1. The small college offers more than 600 courses per year in over 40 courses of study.
Its most popular majors, based on 2021 graduates, were:
- Economics
- Biology/Biological Sciences
- Computer & Information Sciences
- Engineering
- Mathematics
- Research & Experimental Psychology
Rankings
Forbes magazine ranked Swarthmore 27th in its 2024–25 ranking of the top 500 U.S. colleges, universities and service academies.
Swarthmore ranked third among all institutions of higher education in the United States as measured by the percentage of graduates who went on to earn Ph.D.s between 2013 and 2022.
Admissions
The college is considered by U.S. News & World Report as "most selective", with 10.7% of the 9,383 applicants accepted during the 2016–2017 admissions cycle. The number of applicants was the highest in the college's history and among the highest overall of any liberal arts college. The college saw increases in the number of underrepresented students, first-generation college students, and international students. The college reports that "Twenty-five percent of the admitted students are among the first generation in their family to attend college" and "Of the admitted students attending high schools reporting class rank, 94 percent are in the top decile". The class of 2028 admissions statistics have been fully released, where 13,065 applicants resulted in 975 admits for an admit rate of 7.46%.Endowment and tuition fees
As a need-blind school, Swarthmore makes admission decisions and financial aid decisions independently. The cost of tuition, student activity fees, room and board for the 2024–25 academic year was $85,802. The college meets 100% of admitted student demonstrated need without use of student loans, an important distinction from the many schools that meet 100% of demonstrated need, but only through loans rather than institutional grant- and scholarship-based funding. Financial aid is accessed by 56% of the student body, and the average financial aid award was $50,361 during the 2017–18 year.Swarthmore has the eleventh largest endowment per undergraduate in the country. Operating revenue for the 2016 fiscal year was $148,086,000, over 50% of which was provided by the endowment. Swarthmore ended a $230 million capital campaign on October 6, 2006, when President Bloom declared the project completed, three months ahead of schedule. The campaign, christened the "Meaning of Swarthmore", had been underway officially since the fall of 2001. Out of the college's alumni, 87% participated in the effort. Swarthmore's endowment at the end of the 2019 fiscal year was $2.13 billion. Endowment per student was $1,370,157 for the same year, one of the highest rates in the country.
At the end of 2007, the Swarthmore Board of Managers approved the decision for the college to eliminate student loans from all financial aid packages. Instead, additional aid scholarships are granted.
Campus
The campus consists of, based on a north–south axis anchored by Parrish Hall, which houses numerous administrative offices and student lounges, as well as two floors of student housing. The fourth floor houses campus radio station WSRN-FM as well as the weekly student newspaper, The Swarthmore Phoenix.From the SEPTA Swarthmore commuter train station and the borough of Swarthmore to the south, the oak-lined Magill Walk leads north up a hill to Parrish. The campus is coterminous with the grounds of the Scott Arboretum.
The majority of the buildings housing classrooms and department offices are located to the north of Parrish, as are Kyle and Woolman dormitories. McCabe Library is to the east of Parrish, as are the dorms Willets, Mertz, Worth, The Lodges, Alice Paul and David Kemp. To the west are the dorms Wharton, Dana, Hallowell and Danawell, along with the Scott Amphitheater, an open wooded outdoor amphitheater, in which graduations and college collections are held. The Crum Woods extend westward from the main campus, and many buildings on the forest side of the campus incorporate views of the woods. South of Parrish is the Dining Center, attached to the former Sharples dining hall, and other smaller buildings. Dormitories Palmer, Pittenger, Roberts, and the NPPR Apartments are south of the railroad station, as are the athletic facilities, while the Mary Lyon dorm is off-campus to the southwest.
The college has three main libraries and seven other specialized collections.