Swarthmore College

Swarthmore College is a private liberal arts college in the United States with an enrollment of about 1450 students. The college is located in the borough of Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, 11 miles (17.7 km) southwest of Philadelphia.

The school was founded in 1864 by a committee of Quakers who were members of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends. Swarthmore dropped its religious affiliation and became officially non-sectarian in the early 20th century. The college has been coeducational since its founding.

The pronunciation of "Swarthmore" can be pronounced with the first "r" either vocalized or dropped due to differences in rhotic and non-rhotic accents.

Swarthmore's campus is home to the Scott Arboretum.

History

The name "Swarthmore" has its roots in early Quaker history. In England, Swarthmoor Hall in 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 Thomas and Margeret Fell and the inhabitants of the nearby village of Fenmore of Friendly, and Swarthmoor was used for the first Friends' meetings.

The school was founded in 1864 by a committee of Quakers who were members of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends. A more detailed history of Swarthmore can be found here.

Solomon Asch and Wolfgang Köhler were two noted psychologists who were professors at Swarthmore. Asch joined the faculty in 1947 and served until 1966, while Köhler came to Swarthmore in 1935 and served until his retirement in 1958. The Asch conformity experiments took place at Swarthmore.

Academics

In its most recent college ranking, U.S. News & World Report ranked Swarthmore as the number-three liberal arts college, with an overall score of 98/100, behind Williams and Amherst, respectively. Swarthmore is regularly cited as one of the "Little Ivies." Swarthmore's endowment (at the end of FY2005) was about $1.169 billion, ranking 45th amongst all institutions of higher education in the United States. Endowment per student is $766,500, 12th in the U.S. (). The school is particularly notable for its Oxford tutorial-inspired Honors Program, which allows students to take intense, double-credit seminars from their junior year and often write extensive honors theses. Seminars are usually composed of four to eight students, and students in seminars will usually write at least three ten-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 senior year, Honors students take oral and written examinations conducted by outside experts in their field. Around one student in each discipline is awarded "Highest Honors"; others are either awarded "High Honors" or "Honors"; rarely, a student is denied any Honors altogether by the outside examiner. Each department usually has a grade threshold for admittance to the Honors program.

Unusual for a liberal arts college, Swarthmore has an engineering program; at the end of four years, students are granted a B.S. in Engineering. Other notable programs include minors in peace and conflict studies, cognitive science, and interpretation theory.

Swarthmore is a member of the Tri-College Consortium (or TriCo) with nearby Bryn Mawr College and Haverford College that allows students from any of the three to cross-register for courses at any of the others. The consortium as a whole is additionally affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania and students are able to cross-register for courses there as well.

Though students and faculty tout the College's relative lack of grade inflation,Swarthmore's average undergraduate GPA increased from 2.83 in 1973 to 3.24 in 1997 ^*.

Since the 1970's, Swarthmore students have won 135 Fulbright Scholarships, 25 Rhodes Scholarships, 8 Marshall Scholarships, 13 Luce Scholarships, 68 Watson Fellowships, 21 Truman Scholarships, and 1 Mitchell Scholarship.

Tuition and Finances

The total cost of tuition, fees, room, and board for a student entering in the fall of 2005 was $41,280 (tuition and fees were together $31,516).

As previously mentioned, Swarthmore is currently ranked third among all liberal arts colleges (as determined by the infamous US News & World Report Annual Rankings). Since the inception of the rankings, Swarthmore has consistently ranked first, second, or third in what has become a predictable rotation among Williams, Amherst, and Swarthmore, schools sometimes referred to as "Little Ivies." Swarthmore's endowment at the end of FY2005 was approximately $1.169 billion, ranking 45th amongst all institutions of higher education in the United States, and fifth amongst liberal arts colleges . Endowment per student, likewise, was $766,500 for 2004-2005, 12th in the U.S. amongst all institutions of higher education and ahead of both Amherst and Williams. ().

Operating revenue for the 2004-2005 school year was $104,489,000, over 42% of which was provided by the endowment. As is the case with most every elite institution of higher education, actual costs as measured on a per-student basis far exceed revenue from tuition and fees, and so Swarthmore's endowment serves to offset ever-rising costs of education, subsidizing every student's education at Swarthmore--even those paying full tuition. For the 2005-2006 year, tuition, fees, and room & board charges ($41,280) fell well short of the actual cost of education per student, which was approximately $70,300.

Swarthmore is currently engaged in a $230 million capital campaign, christened "The Meaning of Swarthmore" and underway officially since the fall of 2001.

Campus

The campus consists of 357 acres in Swarthmore, Pennslyvania, 11 miles southwest of Philadephia. It is based on a north-south axis anchored by Parrish Hall, which houses the office of admissions, the dean, and the registrar, as well as two floors of student housing. The campus radio station WSRN-FM broadcasts from the top.

From the SEPTA Swarthmore commuter train station and the ville of Swarthmore to the south, the oak-lined Magill Walk leads north up a hill to Parrish. The campus is also coterminous with the Scott Arboretum, cited by some as a main staple of the campus's renowned beauty.

The majority of the buildings housing classrooms and department offices are located to the north of Parrish, as is the quaint Woolman dormitory. McCabe Library is to the east of Parrish, as are the dorms of Willets, Mertz, Worth, and Alice Paul. To the west are the dorms of Wharton, Dana, and Hallowell, Sharples dining hall, the Scott Amphitheater, the two fraternities (Phi Psi and Delta Upsilon), the athletic facilities, and the Crum Creek in the sprawling Crum Woods. Palmer, Pittenger, and Roberts dormitories are south of the railroad station, while Mary Lyon dorm is off-campus to the southwest.^*

Clubs and organizations

There are over 100 chartered clubs and organizations at Swarthmore, in addition to many other unchartered groups. Clubs and organizations are a fundamental part of the College, and the center of many students' energies and social life. This extracurricular involvement contributes to the frequent characterization of Swarthmore students as both motivated and overworked.

Swarthmore offers the full panoply of sporting teams. Notably lacking among these teams though is football, which was controversially eliminated in 2000, along with wrestling, largely due to a lack of suitable athletes on campus.^*

Alumni

Swarthmore's alumni include eight MacArthur Foundation fellows and four Nobel Prize winners, most recently Edward C. Prescott, who graduated in 1962. In addition, hundreds of prominent figures in law, art, science, business, politics, and other fields have attended Swarthmore.

The most famous Swarthmore graduates are probably Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis (1955), who was the Democratic candidate in the 1988 presidential election, and novelist James A. Michener (1929), both of whom graduated with highest honors. Michener left his entire $10 million estate (including the copyrights to his works) to Swarthmore.

Other prominent alumni include Senator Carl Levin of Michigan (1956), astronomer Sandra M. Faber (1966), The Corrections author Jonathan Franzen (1981), Caltech president and Nobel laureate David Baltimore (1960), and Justin Hall (1998), widely considered to be the first blogger. Wall Street magnate and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. founder Jerome Kohlberg, Jr. (1946) founded the Philip Evans Scholarship Foundation in 1986 at Swarthmore. Suffragist and National Women's Party founder Alice Paul graduated in 1905; students voted to name a newly completed residence hall after her in 2005. Astronaut Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, attended but later transferred to Stanford University to major in Physics and English.

Points of interest

Scott Arboretum

External links

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