Amherst College

What is the history of Amherst College?

Amherst College was founded in 1821 in Amherst, Massachusetts, as a college for men. Its early supporters sought to make higher education accessible to students of limited means, including young men preparing for Christian ministry. The institution developed into a nonsectarian liberal arts college rather than a seminary.

Amherst became coeducational in the 1970s, admitting its first class of women as degree candidates in 1976. That change, along with the growth of its academic programs and financial aid, helps explain the college students encounter today: a small undergraduate institution with a broad curriculum and a residential campus.

What are the faculties and departments at Amherst College?

Amherst College is an undergraduate liberal arts college, not a university divided into separate undergraduate, business, engineering, and professional schools. Students work toward a bachelor of arts degree and choose from majors across the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and arts.

Representative fields include English, history, economics, political science, psychology, biology, chemistry, mathematics, computer science, music, and theater and dance. Academic departments administer majors, while interdisciplinary programs let students study questions that cross departmental boundaries. Amherst's open curriculum has no college-wide distribution requirements; students still must satisfy their major's requirements and the college's degree rules. That flexibility gives students room to explore, but it also puts more responsibility on them to plan a coherent course of study.

Amherst participates in the Five College Consortium with Hampshire College, Mount Holyoke College, Smith College, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Cross-registration can expand course choices, subject to the consortium's rules, available places, and approval of how a course will count toward Amherst requirements. The reported student-to-faculty ratio is 6 to 1; that institutional measure does not mean every class has six students.

What is the location of Amherst College?

Amherst College occupies a residential campus in Amherst, Massachusetts, in the Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts. The surrounding town is a college community rather than a large city, and the nearby University of Massachusetts Amherst and other Five College institutions broaden the area's academic and cultural offerings.

Students can use local and regional transit, including Pioneer Valley Transit Authority buses, to reach parts of the Five College area. The consortium's transportation arrangements are useful for cross-registered students, though routes and schedules vary. Bradley International Airport, near Hartford, Connecticut, is a regional air-travel option; getting between the airport and campus requires advance transportation planning. First-year students should also account for Amherst's restriction on registering or parking a car on campus.

What is the mission and vision of Amherst College?

Amherst describes its educational purpose in terms of liberal learning: developing students' intellectual abilities through broad inquiry, close engagement with faculty, and independent judgment. Its open curriculum is a concrete expression of that approach, allowing students to choose courses without a general-education distribution checklist while meeting degree and major requirements.

The college also identifies access and a diverse learning community as institutional priorities. Those are statements of purpose, not guarantees of any individual student's experience. Amherst's historical connection to Christian educational aims does not make it a religiously affiliated college today.