Swarthmore College: Courses, Admission, Cost

Swarthmore College is a private organization that was set up in 1864. Since its inception by the Religious Society of Friends, Swarthmore College has given students the knowledge, understanding, abilities, and experience to become pioneers for the benefit of everyone. With excellent educational programs in liberal arts, colleges of its size, Swarthmore offers more than 600 courses and undergrad research opportunities, from humanities and performing arts to the social and natural sciences and engineering.

Swarthmore's ideal, 425 acres of the campus has rolling lawns, a creek, wooded hills, and hiking trails. It is only 11 miles from Philadelphia. Being a liberal arts college, Swarthmore has an engineering program where toward the culmination of four years' work, students are allowed a B.S. in Engineering. Other eminent programs include minors for peace and conflict studies, cognitive science, and interpretation theory. It has 198 full-time tenure and tenure-track faculty, and 100% of full-time faculty have a terminal degree in their field.

Swarthmore has a reputation for being an academically oriented college, with 66% of students participating in undergraduate research or independent creative projects, and 90% of graduates eventually attending graduate or professional school. Swarthmore's Oxbridge tutorial-inspired Honors Program permits students to take double-credit seminars from their third 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 to 30-page paper by the end of the seminar. Towards the completion of their last year, Honors students take oral and written examinations led by outside specialists in their field. Typically one student in each discipline is granted Highest Honors; others are either awarded High Honors or Honors.

Swarthmore College awarded more than $43 million in scholarship funds for the 2018-2019 academic year. Most of these funds were granted to the students as Swarthmore Scholarships. The Swarthmore Scholarship is a gift from the College that does not need to be repaid. These scholarships may be supported by the college’s endowed, restricted, or general funds. Many of these funds were provided by generous alumni and friends of the college. Recipients of the Swarthmore Scholarship see the award appear as a credit on their college bill each semester. There are other scholarships and grants like Philip Evans Scholars Program, National and Regional McCabe Scholarships, Lang Opportunity Scholarships (LOS), Federal Pell Grants, Federal Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grants, State Grants, Outside Scholarships and Grants.

Swarthmore's alumni include five Nobel Prize winners including the 2004 Economics laureate Edward Prescott and the 1972 Chemistry laureate Christian B. Anfinsen.

Swarthmore also has 11 MacArthur Foundation fellows, second-highest per graduate and ninth-highest overall of any college and hundreds of prominent figures in law, art, science, business, politics, and other fields.