Claremont Colleges
If you are a creative, multifaceted student with a strong academic record who longs for perfect weather, the Claremont Colleges, or “5C’s” as they are fondly known, may be a perfect fit for you. Located in the adorable town of Claremont, California, approximately 35 miles east of Los Angeles, each of these five undergraduate institutions has its own personality, graduation requirements, living/dining experience, policies, and admissions process, but students who attend any of the 5C’s may take classes and even major in any of the departments from any of the colleges. Each college has approximately 1,000 undergraduate students, for a total of just over 5,000 undergrads. There are also 2 additional colleges meant solely for graduate students. The separate colleges mean that undergraduates never have to compete with graduate students for resources and all classes are taught by professors.
The 5C’s include Pomona, the original of the colleges and the one that most resembles a small Ivy League liberal arts college with excellent departments in just about everything, Claremont McKenna, which attracts students most interested in political science, economics, business, and international relations, Harvey Mudd, for the ultra STEM focused students, Scripps, the all-women’s college, which focuses largely on arts and humanities, with strong dance and visual arts departments, and Pitzer, the most recently founded college, which, since the 1960s has been known for social justice and environmentalism, as well as a top-notch media studies department. Although all of the campuses flow into each other, they each have their own architecture, from Scripps’ old California Spanish style, to Pitzer’s native plant zero-scape landscaping, garden project with chickens, and activist student murals. Pitzer students can design their own major, combining 2, 3, even 4 areas of study, which is great for the intellectually curious. All students in the 5C’s have access to performing in their gorgeous concert hall or theatre, as well as the ability to take visual arts classes as a non-major and display work in their many campus galleries.
While any one of these colleges offers an excellent education, a great little college town, and perfect weather, Pitzer strikes a particularly happy note for our academically and socially inclined creative students. The best way to sum up the ethos of this college is to understand the five core values that underpin everything they do from coursework to dining hall management. These values are: social responsibility, in which students spend their four years examining individual impact on making the world a better place, intercultural understanding, which means that the campus not only has a large number of international students, but that over half of the students take advantage of their stellar study abroad options, interdisciplinary learning, exemplified by faculty being organized into field groups rather than academic departments, enabling students to examine the interconnectedness of science, history, art, etc., as well as student engagement and environmental sustainability. Student engagement is taken extremely seriously at Pitzer, as every standing committee, from the one that designs curriculum, to the one that hires and offers tenure to faculty, has at least one member of the student senate with full voting rights. The core value of environmental sustainability is evident as all of the buildings at Pitzer are gold or platinum LEED certified, their dining hall, considered one of the best in the nation, is straw, Styrofoam, and tray-free and works with the city of Claremont to compost practically everything, and, when severe water restrictions were ordered by the governor to address the draught, Pitzer was already well-below the water allocations and didn’t need to change a thing.
Pitzer has a very low acceptance rate of 12-14%, but is test optional and puts the greatest weight on their supplementary essay, which is a single 650 word essay in which students discuss one or more of the core values and how it applies to them. They also weigh student interest and have interviews and overnight visit options, as well as ED 1 and 2 to help demonstrate your love of the school if it turns out to be your dream school.