Swarthmore College ( , ) is a private liberal arts college in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, United States. Founded in 1864, with its first classes held in 1869, Swarthmore is one of the earliest coeducational colleges in the United States. It was established as a college under the Religious Society of Friends. By 1906, Swarthmore had dropped its religious affiliation and officially became non-sectarian.
Swarthmore is an exclusively undergraduate four-year institution. It is a member of the Tri-College Consortium, a cooperative academic arrangement with Bryn Mawr College and Haverford College. Swarthmore is also affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania through the Quaker Consortium, which allows students to cross-register for classes at all four institutions.
Swarthmore's alumni include 6 Nobel Prize winners, 14 MacArthur Foundation fellows, 28 Rhodes Scholars, as well as winners of the Tony Awards, Grammy Awards, Academy Awards, Emmy Awards, and the Guggenheim Fellowship.
History
thumb|Parrish Hall, named in honor of the first president, [[Edward Parrish (1822–1872), contains the admissions, housing, and financial aid offices, along with student housing on the upper floors]]
The name "Swarthmore" has its roots in early Quaker history. In England, Swarthmoor Hall near the town of Ulverston, Cumbria, (previously in Lancashire), was the home of Thomas and Margaret Fell in 1652 when George Fox, fresh from his epiphany atop Pendle Hill in 1651, came to visit. The visitation turned into a long association, as Fox persuaded the couple of his views. Swarthmore was used for the first meetings of what became known as the Religious Society of Friends, later colloquially labeled "Quakers".
The college was founded in 1864 by Deborah Fisher Wharton, along with her industrialist son, Joseph Wharton, together with a committee of members of the Hicksite Yearly Meetings of Philadelphia, New York, and Baltimore. It is the only college founded by the Hicksite branch of the Society of Friends: previous Quaker institutions, like nearby Haverford College, were Orthodox in their founding history. Swarthmore held its first classes in 1869. were among those Friends who insisted that the new college of Swarthmore be coeducational. Edward Hicks Magill, the second president, served for seventeen years. His daughter, Helen Magill, (1853–1944), was in the first class to graduate in 1873; in 1877, she was the first woman in the United States to earn a Ph.D.
In the early 1900s, the college had a major collegiate American football program during the formation period of the soon-to-be nationwide sport, playing Navy, Princeton, Columbia and other larger schools. The 1921 appointment of Frank Aydelotte as president began the development of the school's current academic focus, particularly with his vision for the honors program based on his experience as a Rhodes Scholar. During World War II, Swarthmore was one of 131 colleges and universities nationwide that participated in the V-12 Navy College Training Program, which offered students a path to a U.S. Navy commission.
Wolfgang Köhler, Hans Wallach, and Solomon Asch were noted psychologists who became professors at Swarthmore, a center for Gestalt psychology. Both Wallach, who was Jewish, and Köhler, who was not, had left Nazi Germany because of its discriminatory policies. Köhler came to Swarthmore in 1935 and served until his retirement in 1958. Wallach came in 1936, first as a researcher, and also taught from 1942 until 1975. Asch joined the faculty in 1947 and served until 1966, conducting his noted conformity experiments at Swarthmore.
The 1960s and 1970s saw the construction of new buildings: Sharples Dining Hall in 1964, Worth Health Center in 1965, the Dana/Hallowell Residence Halls in 1967, and Lang Music Building in 1973. – and the establishment of both a Black Cultural Center (1970) and Women's Resource Center (1974). The Environmental Studies program and the Intercultural Center were established in 1992, and in 1993 the Lang Performing Arts Center was opened; the Kohlberg Hall was then established in 1996.
The majority of the buildings housing classrooms and department offices are located to the north of Parrish, as are Kyle and Woolman dormitories. McCabe Library is to the east of Parrish, as are the dorms Willets, Mertz, Worth, The Lodges, Alice Paul, and David Kemp. To the west are the dorms Wharton, Dana, Hallowell, and Danawell, along with the Scott Amphitheater, an open wooded outdoor amphitheater, in which graduations and college collections (meetings) are held. The Crum Woods extend westward from the main campus, and many buildings on the forest side of the campus incorporate views of the woods. South of Parrish is the Dining Center, attached to the former Sharples dining hall, and other smaller buildings. Dormitories Palmer, Pittenger, Roberts, and the NPPR Apartments are south of the railroad station, as are the athletic facilities, while the Mary Lyon dorm is off-campus to the southwest.
Academics
thumb|Cunningham House
Swarthmore's Oxbridge tutorial-inspired honors program, introduced in 1922, allows students to take double-credit seminars from their third year, and they 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 twenty to thirty page paper by the end of the seminar. At the end of their final year, Honors students take oral and written examinations conducted by outside experts in their field. Usually, one student in each discipline is awarded "highest honors"; others are either awarded "high honors" or "honors"; rarely, a student is denied honors altogether by the outside examiner. Each department usually has a grade threshold for admission to the honors program.
Uncommon for a liberal arts college, Swarthmore has an engineering program in which, after four years' work, students are granted a B.S. in engineering. Other notable programs include minors in peace and conflict studies, cognitive science, and interpretation theory.
Swathmore offers more than 600 courses per year in over 40 courses of study.
- Economics (53)
- Biology/Biological Sciences (37)
- Computer & Information Sciences (36)
- Engineering (23)
- Mathematics (18)
- Research & Experimental Psychology (16)
Rankings
Some sources, including Greene's Guides, have termed Swarthmore one of the "Little Ivies". In its 2025 college ranking, U.S. News & World Report ranked Swarthmore as the third-best liberal arts college in the nation, behind Williams and Amherst. Forbes magazine ranked Swarthmore 27th in its 2024–25 ranking of the top 500 U.S. colleges, universities, and service academies. Swarthmore ranked third among all institutions of higher education in the United States as measured by the percentage of graduates who went on to earn Ph.D.s between 2013 and 2022.
Libraries
The college has three main libraries—McCabe Library, the Cornell Library of Science and Engineering, and the Underhill Music and Dance Library—and seven other specialized collections. Friends Historical Library was established in 1871 to collect, preserve, and make available archival, manuscript, printed, and visual records concerning the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) from their origins in the mid-seventeenth century to the present. Besides the focus on Quaker history, the holdings are a significant research collection for the regional and local history of the middle-Atlantic region of the United States and the history of American social reform. Quakers played prominent roles in almost every major reform movement in American history, including abolition, African-American history, Indian rights, women's rights, prison reform, humane treatment of the mentally ill, and temperance. The collections also reflect the significant role Friends played in the development of science, technology, education, and business in Britain and America. The library also maintains the Swarthmore College Archives and the papers of the Swarthmore Historical Society.
Within the archives is what was formerly known as the Jane Addams Peace Collection and later called the Swarthmore College Peace Collection (SCPC). The SCPC includes papers from Jane Addams' collection and material from over 59 countries. The Nobel Peace Prize, awarded to Addams, is part of the collection. The SCPC was started when Lucy Biddle Lewis, a member of the board of managers, discovered that Addams was burning her old papers, and convinced her to donate them instead to the Friends Historical Library. After World War II, the librarian at Princeton University, Julian P. Boyd, appraised the papers in the SCPC's collection and found that they were of "rare historic value".