Vassar College

On our trip this summer, we will be visiting several other schools near Columbia. New York is home to many elite universities, one of them being Vassar College. Vassar is located just outside Poughkeepsie, 75 miles from New York City.

Vassar (est. 1861) is a liberal arts school renowned for its prestigious academic innovations and its beautiful grounds. Along with the 50 majors that Vassar confers, students may also opt to design their own major, and pursue a broad number of interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary studies. Vassar has a great self-instructional foreign language program, teaching many languages including Hindi, Swahili, and Yiddish. Juniors are encouraged to study abroad, and many do for 1 or 2 semesters in sponsored programs in Spain, France, Italy, Ireland, Russia and Germany. 

Competing in the third division of the NCAA, sports at Vassar are very popular. Vassar has 23 varsity-level competing sports teams : basketball, baseball, women's field hockey, women's golf, squash, volleyball, crew, cross-country, track, swimming/diving and tennis. Vassar also has a variety of intramural sports and other athletic activities. 

36.5% of last year's applicants were admitted to Vassar, demonstrating the college's competitive nature. 10% of Vassar's 2,400-some student body are students from over 50 foreign countries. 98% of students live on campus, and the average class size is 17. 60% of the students admitted to Vassar come from public high schools, typically ranking in the top quarter of their class. 

5 Things You Didn't Know About Vassar - Say Whaaat??

1. The campus is actually an arboretum - there are over 200 species of trees in a native plant preserve, and a 400 acre ecological reservation. 

2. Vassar has one of the country's largest undergrad library collections - over a million volumes in print, and many other resources for research and study. 

3. About 30% of the student body is comprised by students of color. 

4. Vassar was actually an all-women college up until 1969; some men were admitted immediately following WW2. 

5. All of the classes are taught by professors and faculty, there are no teacher's assistants or graduate students. There are more than 250 faculty members who all hold a doctorate degree, the equivalent, or higher.