VASSAR COLLEGE

'Vassar College' is a private, coeducational, liberal arts college situated in Poughkeepsie, New York, USA. Founded as a women's college in 1861, it was the first member of the Seven Sisters to become coeducational.^[1] ''U.S. News & World Report'' ranks it #11 among liberal arts colleges in the United States.

Contents

Overview

Academics

Admissions rankings

Presidents of Vassar College

Athletics

Theatre

Architecture

Frances Lehman Loeb Art Gallery

After Vassar

Notable Faculty and Alumni

References

Notes

External links

Overview

Originally a women's college, Vassar is one of the oldest institutions of higher education for women in the United States. It was founded by its namesake, brewer Matthew Vassar, in 1861 in the Hudson Valley, about 70 mi (100 km) north of New York City. The first person appointed to the Vassar faculty was the astronomer Maria Mitchell, in 1865. Vassar adopted coeducation in 1969 after declining an offer to merge with Yale University. However, immediately following World War II, Vassar accepted a very small number of male students on the G.I. Bill. Because Vassar's charter prohibited male matriculants, the graduates were given diplomas via the University of the State of New York. These were reissued under the Vassar title after the school formally became co-ed.^[2]

Vassar's campus, also an arboretum^[3], is 1,000 acres (4 km²) marked by period and modern buildings. The great majority of students live on campus. The renovated library has unusually large holdings for a college of its size. It includes special collections of Albert Einstein, Mary McCarthy, and Elizabeth Bishop.
In its early years, Vassar was associated with the social elite of the Protestant establishment. E. Digby Baltzell writes that "upper-class WASP families ... educated their children at ... colleges such as Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Vassar, and Smith among other elite colleges."^[4] Before becoming President of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a Trustee^[5]
In recent freshman classes, minority students have comprised up to 27% of matriculants. International students from over 45 countries comprise 8% of the student body. In May of 2007, falling in with its commitment to diverse and equitable education, Vassar returned to a need-blind admissions policy wherein students are admitted by their academic and personal qualities, without regard to financial status.
Roughly 2,400 students attend Vassar. About 60% come from public high schools, and 40% come from private schools (both independent and religious). The overall female-to-male ratio is about 60:40, slightly above the standard for a liberal arts college. More than 85% of graduates pursue advanced study within five years of graduation. They are taught by more than 270 faculty members, virtually all of whom hold terminal degrees in their fields.
Vassar president Frances D. Fergusson served for two decades, longer than almost any other president of a comparable liberal arts college. She retired in the spring of 2006, and was replaced on July 1 by Catharine Bond Hill, former provost at Williams College.
The Miscellany News has been the weekly paper of the college since 1866, making it one of the oldest college weeklies in the United States. It is available for free most Thursdays when school is in session. All article content can be accessed at http://misc.vassar.edu.

Academics

Vassar confers the A.B. degree in more than 50 majors, including the Independent Major, in which a student may design a major, as well as various interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary fields of study. Students also participate in such programs as the Self-Instructional Language Program (SILP) which offers courses in Hindi, Irish/Gaelic, Korean, Portuguese, Swahili, Swedish, and Yiddish. Vassar has a flexible curriculum intended to promote breadth in studies. While each field of study has specific requirements for majors, the only universal requirements for graduation are proficiency in a foreign language, a quantitative course, and a freshman writing course. Students are also strongly encouraged to study abroad, which they typically do during one or two semesters of their junior year. Students (usually juniors) may apply for a year or a semester away either in the U.S. or abroad. Vassar sponsors programs in China, England, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, Morocco and Spain; students may also join preapproved programs offered by other colleges. Students may also apply for approved programs at various U.S. institutions, including the historically Black colleges and members of the Twelve College Exchange.
All classes are taught by members of the faculty, and there are almost no graduate students and no teachers' assistants. The most popular majors are English, political science, psychology, and economics. Vassar also offers a variety of correlate sequences, or minors, for intensive study in many disciplines.

Admissions rankings

Vassar College is a leading undergraduate institution in the United States and the world. Vassar is consistently ranked among the top one percent of colleges and universities in the United States and has been a front runner in higher education for nearly a century and a half. Numerous external ratings have confirmed Vassar’s status as one of the most prestigious colleges in the United States. For example, Vassar was named the 1999 Time Magazine/Princeton Review “College of the Year”; the annual US News & World Report college rankings lists Vassar as one of the top 15 colleges in the United States; and the 2002 Princeton Review rankings called Vassar’s students the happiest in the country and the campus one of the two most beautiful.Barron's has placed Vassar in its "most competitive" category for admissions. It is ranked #11 among liberal arts colleges by ''U.S.News & World Report'', tied with Claremont McKenna College, Grinnell College, and Wesleyan University. For its class of 2011, it had an acceptance rate of 28.6%. The Princeton Review gave Vassar a selectivity rating of 97 out of 100 in its 2006 edition. The most recent median SAT score for accepted students is 2110 and 1432 (counting only math and critical reading scores.) The average high school GPA of the student body is 3.7 on a 4.0 scale, with over three quarters of the students ranked in the top 10% of their classes.

Presidents of Vassar College

Name	Dates
Milo P. Jewett	1861–1864
John H. Raymond	1864–1878
Samuel L. Caldwell	1878–1885
James Monroe Taylor	1886–1914
Henry Noble MacCracken	1915–1946
Sarah Gibson Blanding	1946–1964
Alan Simpson	1964–1977
Virginia B. Smith	1977–1986
Frances D. Fergusson	1986–2006
Catharine "Cappy" Bond Hill	2006—

Athletics

Vassar competes in Division III of the NCAA, as a member of the Liberty League.
Vassar College currently offers the following varsity athletics:
- Baseball (Men only)
- Basketball
- Cross-Country
- Fencing
- Field Hockey (Women only)
- Golf (Women only)
- Lacrosse
- Rowing
- Soccer
- Squash
- Swimming/Diving
- Tennis
- Volleyball
Club Sports which compete in NCAA competition
- Rugby
- Track and Field
Other club sports
- Ultimate Frisbee (Men's and Women's)
- Equestrian Team
- Cycling Team (Competes in ECCC)
Basketball plays in the new Athletics and Fitness Center. Volleyball plays in Kenyon Hall, reopened in 2006. Soccer, Baseball, Field Hockey and Lacrosse all play at the Prentiss Fields by the Town Houses, which will be completely renovated starting in November 2006 to include new fields for all teams and a new track.
On April 28th and 29th, the Vassar Cycling Team hosted the Eastern Conference Championships in Collegiate Cycling in Poughkeepsie and New Paltz, NY. The competition included a 98 mile road race over the Gunks in New Paltz as well as a Criterium in Poughkeepsie just blocks from the school's campus.

Theatre

Vassar College has a strong reputation in theater through its Drama Department and its multiple student theater groups. The oldest theater group on campus is Philaletheis, which was founded in 1865 as a literary society. It has now become a completely student run theater group. Others include Unbound, Woodshed, and the Shakespeare troupe. Performances are done all over campus including in the Susan Stein Shiva Theater which is an all student run black box theater. The college also hosts the Powerhouse Summer Theater workshop series.

Architecture

The Vassar campus has several buildings of architectural interest. Main Building formerly housed the entire college, including classrooms, dormitories, museum, library, and dining halls. The building was designed by Smithsonian architect James Renwick Jr. and was completed in 1865. It is on the registry of national historic landmarks. Many beautiful old brick buildings are scattered throughout the campus, but there are also several modern and contemporary structures of architectural interest. Ferry House, a student cooperative, was designed by Marcel Breuer in 1951. Noyes House was designed by Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen. A good example of an attempt to use passive solar design can be seen in the Mudd Chemistry Building by Perry Dean Rogers. More recently, New Haven architect César Pelli was asked to design the Lehman Loeb Art Center, which was completed in the early 1990s. In 2003, Pelli also worked on the renovation of Main Building Lobby and the conversion of the Avery Hall theater into the $25 million Vogelstein Center for Drama and Film, which preserved the original 1860s facade but was an entirely new structure.

Frances Lehman Loeb Art Gallery

The art collection at Vassar dates to the founding of the College, when Matthew Vassar provided an extensive collection of Hudson River School paintings to be displayed in the Main Building. Referred to as the Magoon Collection, it continues to be one of the best in the nation for Hudson River School paintings. The Frances Lehman Loeb Gallery displays a selection of Vassar's 17,000 articles of art in the building designed by Cesar Pelli (see Architecture). Today, the gallery's collection displays art from the ancient world up through contemporary works. The collection includes work by European masters such Brueghel, Doré, Picasso, Balthus, Bacon, Vuillard, Cézanne, Braque and Bonnard, as well as examples from leading twentieth-century American painters Jackson Pollock, Agnes Martin, Mark Rothko, Marsden Hartley, Georgia O'Keefe, Charles Sheeler, and Ben Shahn. The Loeb's works on paper represent a major collection in the United States, with prints by Rembrandt (including important impressions of the "Hundred Guilder Print" and the "Three Trees") and Durer as well as photographs by Cindy Sherman, Diane Arbus, and others.

After Vassar

75-80% of Vassar graduates plan to pursue advanced study within 5 years of graduation. Graduates are accepted regularly at top-ranking schools of law, medicine, business, and education. Vassar is a leader in producing Ph.D. candidates. The Office of Career Development provides counseling and connections with hundreds of top employers nationwide.

Notable Faculty and Alumni

Main articles: List of Vassar College people

References

★ Horowitz, Helen Lefkowitz. ''Alma Mater: Design and Experience in the Women's Colleges from Their Nineteenth-Century Beginnings to the 1930s,'' Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993 (2nd edition).

Notes

1. Vassar Firsts
2. Vassar's Vets: Forgotten Grads
3. Frances Daley Fergusson: Creating a campus that inspires
4. Judgment and Sensibility: Religion and Stratification, , E. Digby, Baltzell, Transaction Publishers, 1994, ISBN 1-56000-048-1 , p. 8
5. Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Local Trustee

External links

★ Official website

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★ The Vassar College Encyclopedia

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★ Vassar College Infosite (news and events)

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★ Campus tour

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★ The college catalogue, with a complete listing of all available concentrations

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★ Vassar innovators

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★ History of Vassar College

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★ Vassar in popular culture

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★ The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center