Founded in 1821 as a nonsectarian institution for ‘the education of indigent young men of piety and talents,” Amherst College is now widely regarded as one of the premier liberal arts colleges in the nation, enrolling a diverse group of approximately 1,700 young men and women.
Renowned for its talented students, committed faculty, and rigorousacademic life, Amherst offers the B.A. degree in 36 fields of study. With a faculty-student ratio of 1 to 8, Amherst’s classes are characterized by spirited interchange among students and acclaimed faculty skilled at asking challenging questions. Students participate in sophisticated research, making use of state-of-the-art equipment and facilities. And Amherst’s open curriculum allows each student—with the help of faculty advisers—to chart an individual course through the more than 800 courses offered at
the college; there are no distribution requirements. Honors work is encouraged and in recent years has been undertaken by nearly half of the graduating class.
Amherst is a member of the Five Colleges, a consortium with nearby Smith, Mount Holyoke and Hampshire Colleges and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Students may take courses at any of the colleges, and the schools’ proximity adds to Amherst’s rich social and extracurricular life.
Diversity, defined in its broadest sense, is fundamental to Amherst’s mission. The college enrolls students from nearly every state and from more than 40 countries, and for the past several years more than 35 percent of Amherst’s students have been students of color. Since its founding, Amherst has remained one of the few truly need-blind colleges in the nation; students are admitted without regard to financial aid, and each admitted student is guaranteed financial aid equal to financial need. The college’s financial aid packages are consistently the most generous in the nation, and among its peer universities and colleges Amherst has the most economic diversity. By any measure of accessibility and quality Amherst is consistently ranked among the top schools in the country. Its outstanding resources, dedicated faculty and rigorous academic life allow the college to enroll students with an extraordinary range of talents, interests and commitments.
With an endowment of more than $1.2 billion, Amherst has extensive physical resources. The college’s scenic 1,000-acre campus is near the center of the town of Amherst.
Amherst has a distinguished group of alumni. The 
college has more than 20,000 graduates, who are represented in almost every walk of life. Many are or have been prominent on the world scene (including four Nobel laureates, numerous Pulitzer Prize winners, the president of the National Urban League, a chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, several National Book Award winners and a U.S. president), and countless others contribute to society in important but less public ways. More than 60 percent of Amherst’s alumni make a gift to Amherst each year—among the highest alumni participation rates in the country.
History of Amherst College
In 1821 a broad group of local people in and around Amherst worked together to create an institution of higher learning for the education of indigent young men of piety and talents for the Christian ministry (as the call for donations to the initial endowment, the Charity Fund, phrased it).
Edward Jones,
Class of 1826
Noah Webster, already well known from his textbooks and dictionaries, played a vital role in fundraising and in shaping the institution. He had served as a trustee of Amherst Academy since its incorporation in 1815, and was president of its board of trustees during the critical 1820-21 period, when Amherst College was formed.
Webster had been on the committee formed in 1818 by the Academy’s trustees to call a regional convention regarding founding a new educational institution — that which eventually materialized as Amherst College.
In addition to educating the indigent, the new college showed awareness of and early support for others who might not commonly have had access to higher education. The college’s first African-American graduate, Edward Jones, was a member of the Class of 1826; he eventually settled in Sierra Leone and became principal of the Fourah Bay Christian Institution (forerunner of Fourah Bay College). Amherst’s first Japanese graduate, the young samurai Joseph Hardy Neesima, Class of 1870, fled Japan when foreign travel was still prohibited. Neesima converted to Christianity and returned to Japan in 1875 to found the school that would become Doshisha University, Amherst’s sister institution in Kyoto.
Amherst College first admitted women in 1975. Today the diverse and international student body includes men and women from a wide variety of ethnic, cultural and socio-economic backgrounds from all over the United States and more than 40 other countries.
The Mission of Amherst College
Amherst College educates men and women of exceptional potential from all backgrounds so that they may seek, value, and advance knowledge, engage the world around them, and lead principled lives of consequence.
Amherst brings together the most promising students, whatever their financial need, in order to promote diversity of experience and ideas within a purposefully small residential community. Working with faculty, staff, and administrators dedicated to intellectual freedom and the highest standards of instruction in the liberal arts, Amherst undergraduates assume substantial responsibility for undertaking inquiry and for shaping their education within and beyond the curriculum.
Amherst College is committed to learning through close colloquy and to expanding the realm of knowledge through scholarly research and artistic creation at the highest level. Its graduates link learning with leadership—in service to the College, to their
Visit Amherst
Planning a visit to Amherst College? These pages will help you get to and around campus.
- Campus Map
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Planes, trains, buses, shuttle service - Parking
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Hotels, motels, B&Bs, camping - Town of Amherst
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The Admission Office offers tours and information sessions for high school students interested in visiting Amherst.
During your visit to Amherst, you may enjoy visiting the college’s museums and 500-acre Wildlife Sanctuary.
Can’t make it to campus for a tour? Take our virtual tour, narrated by Josef Ntim ’12 and Bessie Young ’11.
Academics
AMHERST’S FACULTY
A student-to-faculty ratio of eight to one and an average class size of 16 enable Amherst students to interact closely with professors who are internationally known scholars, researchers, authors, and artists.
Read news stories about Amherst faculty.
Read about our faculty’s scholarly achievements.
Partake of our faculty’s knowledge in our Ask the Expert interviews.
Browse our faculty profiles.
BROWSE COURSES
See our areas of study to browse courses within departments or majors.
Browse the Amherst College Course Scheduler andFive College Course Catalog. Amherst students may take courses at any of the Five Colleges for no additional cost.
ACADEMIC CALENDAR
Wondering about deadlines, exam periods, and holidays? See our Academic Calendar.
Amherst is an undergraduate, residential, liberal arts college that awards the Bachelor of Arts degree in 36 different majors. Special features include the open curriculum; opportunities for collaborative faculty-student research, community-based learning, and participation incolloquia and special seminars throughout the year; a long history of distinguished teaching and scholarship; and membership in the Five College Consortium. Amherst students may take courses for credit at Smith, Mount Holyoke, and Hampshire Colleges and the University of Massachusetts. Browse the Amherst College Course Scheduler and Five College Course Catalog.
OPEN CURRICULUM
Amherst’s open curriculum has no core or general education requirements. Beyond courses for the major and the First-Year Seminar, students are free to design their own curriculum. With this freedom comes the responsibility to choose wisely and carefully—plus the opportunity to explore learning as never before. Faculty members, faculty advisors and fellow students offer guidance to students at every stage to help them explore fully the liberal arts.
FIRST-YEAR SEMINARS
All incoming first-year students take a First-Year Seminar during their fall semester, choosing from among 28 different topics, from Happiness to Thought Experiments in the Development of Physics. While the seminars address widely divergent topics and are often taught in innovative ways, these small seminars share a common purpose: to encourage students to venture into the unfamiliar, while working closely with professors and fellow students in a collaborative setting to explore ideas. These seminars are discussion-based classes offering writing-attentive instruction with frequent and varied assignments, close reading and critical interpretation of written texts, and careful attention to the development and analysis of argument in speech and writing.
MAJORS
Amherst offers the Bachelor of Arts degree in 36 fields of study in the arts, sciences, social sciences and humanities. Students can carry more than one major, create their own interdisciplinary major, or engage in independent scholarship. Many students choose to delve more deeply into their major field by undertaking honors theses during their senior year. Often the equivalent of graduate-level work, theses have taken the form of a major paper, scientific investigation or creative work.
FIVE COLLEGE CONSORTIUM
While Amherst is a small liberal arts college, through the Five College Consortium Amherst students may access a much wider array of courses, library resources, lectures, concerts, research opportunities, and activities. The consortium is an unusual cooperative arrangement among Amherst, Smith, Mount Holyoke, and Hampshire Colleges and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. All five campuses are linked by a free bus system, and all are located within a 10-mile radius of Amherst. Amherst undergraduates can enroll in credit-bearing classes at any of the other campuses at both the undergraduate and graduate level without paying extra tuition; earn Five College Certificates in 10 fields; and learn 27 languages through Five College supervised independent and mentoredlanguage programs.
THE AMHERST FACULTY
Amherst College prides itself on its outstanding and dedicated faculty, who are committed to expanding the realm of knowledge through teaching, scholarly research, and artistic creation at the highest level. Current faculty have received awards from the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, American Council of Learned Societies, Mellon Foundation, Tinker Foundation, Luce Foundation, and Ford Foundation, as well as Guggenheim and Fulbright fellowships. Students often work one-on-one with the faculty both in class and in the pursuit of independent research. To learn more about faculty members, along with their research interests, publications, and more, browse our faculty profiles.
MENTORING, ADVISING, AND SUPPORT
With its close-knit community, Amherst offers a strong support network. Students find encouragement, inspiration, and advice throughout campus. Incoming students benefit from the knowledge of their academic faculty advisor, along with that of a group of about 50 other professors who work with new students to navigate the course selection process during Orientation week. Students also develop informal relationships with professors, deans, and upperclassmen who serve as mentors and offer guidance on how to take advantage of Amherst’s many resources.
A range of academic support services are available to support the academic work of students, including the Moss Quantitative Center, the Writing Center, the Academic Peer Tutors, and the Academic Peer Mentoring Program.
Student Life at Amherst
Amherst students have countless opportunities to enrich their educations through co-curricular and extracurricular activities. A student might go to hear a guest speaker in anthropology, take a karate class, sing in an a cappella concert and then help paint a house with Pioneer Valley Habitat for Humanity—all in a single week!
STUDENT GROUPS & PUBLICATIONS
Students lead over 100 different autonomous organizations, including groups for activism and community service, religious and cultural affinity groups, intramural sports teams, clubs for various arts and crafts, student newspapers and journals, a debate team, a radio station and more. If you have an interest that’s not represented in the 100 groups already on campus, you can start your own group or join a student organization at one of the other colleges in the Five College consortium. Representatives of Amherst’s student government, not college administrators, decide how to allocate about $250,000 among student organizations.
RESIDENTIAL LIFE
All first-year Amherst students live in new or newly renovated residences on the Main Quad. These residences feature well-designed living spaces, along with common spaces for studying, socializing, playing music and performing. Ninety-seven percent of students live on campus, and housing is guaranteed for all four years. When hunger pangs hit, check the menu at Valentine Dining Hall, which offers an extraordinary range of food options. Learn more about residential life at Amherst »
ATHLETICS
At Amherst, academics come first. But athletics are a vibrant part of the living and learning experience, too. Most students take part on some level, from informal recreation to intramural and club sports to the 27 NCAA Division III teams. The extensive athletic facilities—open to all students—include excellent playing fields, an 8,000-square-foot fitness center, pool, courts and an ice rink. Beyond Amherst, you can jog the Norwottuck Trail that borders campus, kayak on the Connecticut River or mountain bike the Robert Frost Trail.
GREEN AMHERST
Sustainability matters at Amherst. The college is taking bold steps to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions, making significant progress by altering how it designs, builds, operates and maintains its facilities to ensure efficient use of natural resources. The college invests in energy conservation projects and generates electricity and steam through a cogeneration plant. Additionally, Amherst protects 500 acres of open fields, wetlands, flood plain woods, river, upland woods, plantation pines and ponds in its Wildlife Sanctuary.
Amherst Athletics
* Named #1 overall in 2010 NCSA Collegiate Scouting Power Rankings for academic and athletic performance
* 32 percent of students participate in varsity sports
* 80 percent of students participate in club/intramural sports
* Oldest athletics program in the nation
* Third oldest football field in the nation (Pratt Field, 1891)
* “Little Three” rivalry with Williams and Wesleyan is the oldest “conference” in the nation (100+ years)
* Participated in first-ever intercollegiate baseball game, defeating Williams in Pittsfield, Mass., in 1859 by a score of 73-32
* 124 years of football games with Williams (entering 2010), called the “Biggest Little Game in America”
* 15 consecutive top-15 finishes in Directors’ Cup standings among NCAA Division III schools for athletic achievement (finished 2nd in 2009-10)