Swarthmore College

Swarthmore College

Swarthmore was one of the earliest coeducational colleges in the United States , located  in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, 11 miles (18 km) southwest of Philadelphia. It is a is a private liberal arts college.

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's Oxbridge tutorial-inspired Honors Program allows students to take double-credit seminars from their junior year and often write honors theses. Seminars are usually composed of four to eight students. 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. Usually 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 admission to the Honors program

The college is considered by U.S. News & World Report as "most selective", with 12.4% accepted of the 7,817 applicants during the 2014–2015 admissions cycle, a 4.6% drop in acceptance. Of those admitted, the college reports that of the 44% who reported rank, "33 percent are valedictorians or salutatorians. [52] percent are in [the] top two percent of their high school class and 94 percent are in the top decile."In 2012, The Princeton Review gave Swarthmore a 99 out of 99 on their Admissions Selectivity Rating. In the November 2003 selectivity ranking for undergraduate programs, The Atlantic magazine ranked Swarthmore as the only liberal arts college to make the top ten institutions, placing Swarthmore in tenth place.