King's College is a highly-ranked Roman Catholic, private liberal arts college, located in downtown Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. The total student enrollment is approximately 2,400. The college is administered by priests and brothers from the Congregation of Holy Cross, who are the founders of the University of Notre Dame and several other Catholic colleges in the United States. The college's current President is the Rev. Thomas J. O'Hara.

The college offers baccalaureate degrees in the basic arts and sciences, business, and several specialized fields such as physician assistant and gerontology. Master degree programs are offered in education and health care.

All students are required to complete a number of core courses, the CORE curriculum. The courses are designed so that all students, no matter what their major, obtain the basic skills of critical thinking, effective writing, effective oral communication, library and information literacy, computer competence, creative thinking and problem solving, quantitative reasoning, and moral reasoning.

King's recently achieved accreditation status for the McGowan School of Business and is seeking accreditation in the education departments.

History

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King's is a relatively new school, having been founded in 1946. The school was initially built with the hope that the sons of the many miners that lived in the Northeastern Pennsylvania area would attend, as well as war veterans who could take advantage of the new GI Bill. Though the school is on a high level in Wilkes-Barre, geographically-wise, Tropical Storm Agnes still affected the college as it did most of the rest of the city of Wilkes-Barre. A marker in front of the student center exists to show how high the flood waters from the storm went, almost going up to many student's waists. The college has always been a relatively small liberal arts school, but has expanded tremendously in the last two decades. Recently, a court was added in the middle of campus, which had previously been a street that divided the campus in half. Recently, King's and neighboring school Wilkes University joined in an effort to bring a downtown bookstore to Wilkes-Barre to help revitalize the city. King's has made many efforts recently to purchase abandoned buildings off-campus to try and turn them into commercial or residential properties, with the help of private investors.

Sports

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King's College has a somewhat diverse athletic program, with all of its teams playing at NCAA Division III level. The college's athletic nickname is the Monarchs. The two biggest programs are the basketball and football programs. The women's basketball team has spent several years in the last decade nationally ranked by d3hoops.com and the men's team went to the Elite Eight of the NCAA tournament 2004-2005. All King's sports teams compete in the Middle Atlantic Corporation, better known as the MAC or Middle Atlantic Conference. Radio coverage by WRKC is usually given to the basketball and football games, but also sometimes baseball. Local newspaper coverage for Monarchs sports is usually provided by the Citizen's Voice and The Times Leader. The Lady Monarchs softball team has also won MAC championships 6 consecutive years in a row.

Media

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King's College has a student-run radio station, "Radio King's College" WRKC. According to radio-locator.com, the signal fringes out to Scranton, Pennsylvania to the north and Shickshinny to the south. The station is completely student-run except for the general manager. WRKC is well known for playing bands before commercial stations discover them, such as U2. WRKC was the first station to play them in Northeastern Pennsylvania. WRKC primarily plays indie and punk music, but allows students to play their own music during their shows as well, as long as it is not mainstream music.

King's has a student newspaper called The Crown that is published every other Tuesday during the school year. The college, which recently started a Mass Communications Media Club in the fall semester of 2005, has a closed-circuit campus television station, KCTV 4, which sporadically airs shows such as a talk show ("King's Live"), basketball games, news shows and sports shows.

Famous Students

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According to the news network's website, CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer possesses an honorary degree from King's College.

Broadway set and costume designer Santo Loquasto is a King's graduate.

The founder of the company that produces the drug Lunesta is a King's graduate.

New Jersey State Deputy attorney General, Judith Andrejko, is a 1996 graduate of King's College.

Former Chairman of MCI Communications, William G. McGowan, is a King's College graduate. The college's business school is named for McGowan.

External link

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• King's College

Holy Cross universities and colleges | Roman Catholic universities and colleges in the United States | Universities and colleges in Pennsylvania | Liberal arts colleges | 1946 establishments