Amherst College

Amherst College located in Amherst, Massachusetts, United States. It is a  is a private liberal arts college. Amherst is the third oldest institution of higher education in Massachusetts.  Amherst has historically had close relationships and rivalries with Williams College and Wesleyan University which form the Little Three colleges.

Amherst is an exclusively undergraduate four-year institution and enrolled 1,795 students in the fall of 2015. Students choose courses from 38 major programs in an open curriculum. Students are not required to study a core curriculum or fulfil any distribution requirements and may even design their own unique interdisciplinary major. Freshmen may take advanced courses, and seniors may take introductory ones. For the class of 2020, Amherst received 8,397 applications and accepted 1,149 yielding a 13.7% acceptance rate.  Amherst was ranked as the second best liberal arts college in the country by U.S. News & World Report, and ninth out of all U.S. colleges and universities by Forbes in their 2015 rankings.

Amherst College offers 36 fields of study not less than  850 courses in the sciences, arts, humanities, mathematics and computer sciences, social sciences, foreign languages, classics, and several interdisciplinary fields including premedical studies and provides an unusually open curriculum. Students are not required to study a core curriculum or fulfil any distribution requirements and may even design their own unique interdisciplinary major. Freshmen may take advanced courses, and seniors may take introductory ones.Amherst College has been the first college to have undergraduate departments in the interdisciplinary fields of American Studies; Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought; and Neuroscience and has helped to pioneer other interdisciplinary programs, including Asian Languages and Civilizations.The Amherst library is named for long-time faculty member, poet Robert Frost.Amherst College has been recognized for its commitment to quality teaching, with professor-student interaction, so much so that Harvard and Columbia University looked to Amherst in 2007 when they were in the throes of reviewing their teaching program. The student-faculty ratio is 8:1 and 90% of classes have fewer than 30 students.