Lehigh University

Based on Wikipedia: Lehigh University

The University Built Into a Mountain

In March 2012, something improbable happened on national television. A small engineering school from Pennsylvania that most basketball fans had never heard of defeated Duke University—one of the most storied programs in college basketball—in the first round of the NCAA tournament. The final score was 75-70. It was only the sixth time in tournament history that a fifteenth seed had toppled a second seed.

The school was Lehigh University.

Founded in 1865 by a railroad magnate in the industrial heart of Pennsylvania, Lehigh has spent more than a century and a half cultivating a particular identity: rigorous, practical, and unexpectedly excellent. Its graduates invented the escalator, founded the Packard Motor Car Company, and engineered the locks of the Panama Canal. The university sits on 2,350 acres across three campuses in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, its original buildings literally built into the northern slope of South Mountain.

Today, with roughly six thousand undergraduates and fewer than two thousand graduate students, Lehigh remains smaller than many of its peers. But in certain circles—particularly engineering, business, and increasingly, health sciences—it punches far above its weight class. The university holds the federal government's highest designation for research activity, classified as "Doctoral Universities R1: Very High Research Activity." And according to PayScale's 2024 analysis, Lehigh's business majors earn more money than graduates from any other school in the country, with a mid-career median salary approaching two hundred thousand dollars.

How did a university most Americans couldn't locate on a map become one of the country's most lucrative educational investments?

The Packer Fortune and the Lehigh Valley

To understand Lehigh, you need to understand Asa Packer.

Packer was a carpenter's apprentice who became one of the wealthiest men in nineteenth-century America. He built the Lehigh Valley Railroad, which transported anthracite coal from Pennsylvania's mines to markets across the eastern seaboard. By the 1860s, the railroad had made him a fortune, and he decided to put it to work.

In 1865, Packer donated $500,000—an enormous sum at the time—along with fifty-six acres of land to establish a new polytechnic university. His vision was practical: the Lehigh Valley needed engineers and technicians to run its growing industrial economy. The university that bears his name was designed from the start to produce people who could build things.

The location Packer chose was unconventional. Rather than situating the campus on flat ground, he built it into the side of South Mountain, overlooking the city of Bethlehem. The terrain forced creative solutions. Buildings stepped up the hillside. Walking between classes meant climbing. The physical plant itself became a kind of engineering challenge.

Today, the university sprawls across three connected campuses. The original Asa Packer Campus clings to the mountain's northern slope. The Mountaintop Campus sits at the summit, hosting research facilities and athletic fields. And the Murray H. Goodman Campus extends south into Lower Saucon Township, home to the football stadium and most sports facilities. In 2012, a gift from the Stabler Foundation added another 755 acres in Upper Saucon Township, bringing the total to its current size—larger than Central Park, though considerably hillier.

Engineering as Foundation

Lehigh's identity has always been rooted in engineering.

The university's P.C. Rossin College of Engineering and Applied Science has produced an outsized share of American industry. Jesse Reno, class of 1883, invented the escalator—originally called the "inclined elevator"—which he demonstrated at the 1900 Paris Exposition. James Ward Packard, class of 1884, founded the Packard Motor Car Company, which for decades produced some of America's most prestigious automobiles. The locks and lock gates of the Panama Canal—one of the greatest engineering projects in human history—were built by companies led by Lehigh graduates.

The university's engineering pedigree extends into more recent memory. Lee Iacocca, class of 1945, became one of the most famous business executives in American history, credited with creating the Ford Mustang and later rescuing Chrysler from bankruptcy. Roger Penske, who attended in the early 1960s, built a racing and transportation empire that bears his name. Terry Hart became an astronaut. The pattern repeats across generations.

Perhaps fittingly, Tau Beta Pi—the oldest and most prestigious engineering honor society in the United States—was founded at Lehigh in 1885. It was the brainchild of a student named Edward Higginson Williams Jr., who believed that engineers deserved the same kind of recognition for academic achievement that Phi Beta Kappa provided to liberal arts students. The society now has chapters at virtually every engineering school in the country, but it started in Bethlehem.

Beyond the Slide Rule

For most of its history, Lehigh was exclusively male—a technical school training men for industrial careers. That changed in 1971, when the university admitted women to undergraduate programs for the first time.

The transition was part of a broader evolution. Lehigh had always offered more than engineering, but its other programs took longer to develop their reputations. The College of Business, for instance, traces its origins to 1893, when the university first offered classes in economics and commerce. But it wasn't until 1918 that a professor named John L. Stewart—the school's first dedicated economist—formally established a separate business college. Its inaugural graduating class in 1922 numbered just seventy-seven students.

The business program grew steadily through the twentieth century. In 1938, it received accreditation from the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, a mark of legitimacy that relatively few programs held at the time. Enrollment jumped twenty-five percent that year. By the 1950s, the college had expanded into graduate education, offering both Master of Business Administration and Master of Science degrees.

Today, Lehigh's business school consistently ranks among the top programs in the country. Poets and Quants, a publication that covers business education, ranked its undergraduate program twenty-third nationally in 2023. More strikingly, U.S. News and World Report found that Lehigh's one-year MBA program ranked fifth in the nation for salary-to-debt ratio—meaning graduates emerge with high-paying jobs relative to how much they borrowed to attend.

The College of Arts and Sciences, based in Maginnes Hall, offers the humanities and social sciences that round out a university education. It maintains a Humanities Center that hosts the Drown Writers Series, bringing authors to campus. The music programs include a marching band, wind ensemble, and philharmonic orchestra. A program called ArtsLehigh works to integrate the arts more fully into campus life—no small task at an institution historically defined by slide rules and lab coats.

The Newest College

Lehigh's most recent addition is its College of Health, which opened in August 2020—timing that could not have been more relevant.

The college claims a unique distinction: it was the first in the world to offer undergraduate, graduate, and executive degrees specifically in population health. Population health is a field that examines health outcomes across entire communities rather than focusing on individual patients. It encompasses epidemiology (the study of how diseases spread), biostatistics (the mathematical analysis of health data), and public policy.

The college is housed in the Health, Science, and Technology building, which opened in January 2022. Its creation reflects a broader recognition that health challenges in the twenty-first century require more than doctors treating individual patients. Understanding why some communities are healthier than others—and what can be done about it—requires training that bridges medicine, statistics, and social science.

The College of Education, meanwhile, has operated for decades, though it differs from Lehigh's other schools in one notable respect: it offers only graduate programs. As of 2018, more than seven thousand students had received master's degrees, doctoral degrees, teaching certificates, and professional credentials from the program.

Getting In

Lehigh has become significantly more competitive over the past decade.

In 2024, the university received over twenty thousand applications and admitted just under 5,300 students—an acceptance rate of about twenty-five percent. Of those admitted, roughly 1,500 chose to enroll. The standardized test scores of admitted students tell a similar story: among those who submitted scores (about half the incoming class), the middle fifty percent scored between 1420 and 1520 on the SAT, and between 32 and 35 on the ACT.

For context, those SAT scores place Lehigh's admitted students roughly in the ninety-fifth percentile of all test-takers nationwide. These are students who could attend almost any university in the country.

The selectivity represents a dramatic shift from earlier eras. As recently as the 2000s, Lehigh accepted a much higher proportion of applicants. The change reflects both the school's rising reputation and broader trends in college admissions. Applications to selective universities have soared nationwide, driven by the Common Application, demographic shifts, and intensifying competition for spots at schools perceived as elite.

Rankings, whatever their methodological limitations, have reflected this rise. The Wall Street Journal, which weights student outcomes heavily in its analysis, ranked Lehigh fourteenth among all American colleges in 2024. U.S. News and World Report placed it forty-sixth among national universities. The Princeton Review named it first in the country for science lab facilities and tenth for its library.

The Hill and Its Fraternities

Every university has a social geography, and at Lehigh, that geography centers on "The Hill."

Upper and Lower Sayre Park Roads wind through a neighborhood of fraternity and sorority houses that has defined Lehigh's social scene for over a century. At its peak in the mid-1980s, thirty-six fraternities operated on The Hill—a remarkable number for a school of Lehigh's size. Sororities, notably, were forced to operate off campus during this era, a disparity that reflected broader inequities of the time.

The 1980s represented what many call Lehigh's "golden age of fraternities." But that age ended abruptly when the drinking age rose to twenty-one. Fraternities that had operated as de facto bars for undergraduates suddenly faced legal liability for underage drinking. Hazing incidents and disciplinary problems multiplied. Through the 1990s, the university shut down one fraternity after another.

Many former fraternity houses were converted to sorority houses. Others were demolished to make way for dormitories. As of 2024, some houses on The Hill remain vacant—architectural remnants of an earlier social order.

Today, about twenty-one percent of undergraduates belong to a fraternity or sorority, down substantially from earlier decades. Ten fraternities and eight sororities maintain houses on campus. Some former Greek houses have been converted into "Themed Communities," where students with shared interests—sustainability, social justice, global citizenship—can live together.

The shift reflects a broader national trend. Greek life remains influential at many universities, but its dominance has waned as schools have invested in alternative social structures and as concerns about hazing and exclusivity have intensified.

The Rivalry

If there is one tradition that unites Lehigh's past and present, it is football—specifically, the annual game against Lafayette College.

The two schools have played each other more than one hundred sixty times since 1884. It is the most-played rivalry in the history of college football. It is also the longest uninterrupted rivalry: the teams have met annually since 1897, continuing through world wars, pandemics, and every other disruption of the past century and a quarter.

Lafayette College sits just twenty miles away in Easton, Pennsylvania. Both schools are small, private, and academically rigorous. Both emphasize engineering. The similarity breeds contempt—or at least the ritualized version of it that rivalries require.

The week before the game, known as Le-Laf Week or Spirit Week, transforms Lehigh's campus. Fraternities decorate their houses. Rallies fill common spaces. The Marching 97—Lehigh's band, which proudly claims exactly ninety-seven members—parades unexpectedly through Friday classes, a tradition that dates to the 1970s when an economics professor named Rich Aaronson invited the band to interrupt his introductory course.

One of the more distinctive Spirit Week traditions is the Bed Races. Teams of students decorate beds and race them down the street. The event began as an informal competition among fraternities, who built their own beds to showcase engineering prowess and raced them down the steep hills near their houses. Since 2014, the university has mandated uniform beds for safety reasons. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the beds became motorized and the races moved to the flatter terrain of Packer Avenue.

For the one hundred fiftieth meeting between the two schools, they played at Yankee Stadium in New York City before a sold-out crowd. Few Division I rivalries could fill such a venue. Lehigh and Lafayette managed it.

Beyond the Football Field

Lehigh competes in twenty-five NCAA Division I sports as a member of the Patriot League, a conference of academically selective universities including Bucknell, Colgate, and Army.

The university's academic emphasis shows in its athletic outcomes. In 2006, ninety-seven percent of Lehigh's student-athletes graduated—the twelfth-best rate among all 326 Division I institutions. In 2002, Lehigh won the inaugural USA Today/NCAA Foundation Award for having the highest graduation rate of any Division I school in the country.

Individual athletes have achieved remarkable success. Lehigh graduates have played in the National Football League, Major League Baseball, Major League Soccer, and the National Basketball Association. They have won Olympic gold medals. They have competed in the Super Bowl. The university's wrestling program, in particular, has produced national-caliber competitors for decades.

And then there was that basketball game in March 2012.

Duke entered the tournament as one of the favorites to win the national championship. Lehigh was a heavy underdog—the kind of opponent major programs expect to dispatch without difficulty. But C.J. McCollum, a guard who would later play more than a decade in the NBA, scored thirty points. The Mountain Hawks—Lehigh's somewhat unusual mascot—executed their game plan. And when the final buzzer sounded, one of college basketball's great Goliaths lay defeated.

The victory did not launch a dynasty. Lehigh remains a small school with modest athletic resources. But for one afternoon in March, a university known for producing engineers and executives produced something else: the thrill of the impossible.

The Mountaintop and Beyond

Lehigh maintains an Army Reserve Officers' Training Corps unit—the Steel Battalion of the Second ROTC Brigade—headquartered in Jordan Hall on the Mountaintop Campus. The unit has operated since 1919, training students for military service alongside their engineering and business studies.

The military connection reflects something broader about Lehigh's history. This is a school that has always valued practical application. Its graduates don't just study problems; they build solutions. They run companies and command units. They invent devices and manage systems.

That practicality extends to newer initiatives. In 2020, Lehigh was one of four Pennsylvania colleges to receive the Campus Sustainability Achievement Award from the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education. The recognition came for the school's participation in the Solar Collaboration Project, a consortium effort to expand renewable energy use. The Princeton Review now ranks Lehigh twenty-fourth among "Top Green Colleges"—a measure that would have seemed irrelevant to Asa Packer's coal-hauling railroad, but that reflects the shifting priorities of twenty-first-century industry.

The university's 584 full-time faculty members—ninety-five percent of whom hold doctoral degrees—continue the work of teaching and research. The board of trustees, established in 1866, governs the institution. Student senates, one for undergraduates and one for graduate students, offer recommendations and distribute funding to campus organizations.

The school colors, brown and white, date to 1874. The student newspaper, The Brown and White, has published continuously since 1894. Class flags, passed down from adopting classes fifty years senior, connect current students to those who walked the same mountain paths more than a century ago. The oldest surviving flag dates to 1889.

The Mountain Endures

In the end, what distinguishes Lehigh is not any single achievement but a particular combination of qualities.

It is selective but not exclusive, rigorous but not pretentious. It trains engineers and business leaders but also artists and teachers. It competes in Division I athletics but graduates nearly all its athletes. It maintains traditions dating to the nineteenth century but opened a College of Health during a global pandemic.

The physical setting—a campus built into a mountainside in the industrial heart of Pennsylvania—shapes the experience. Students walk uphill to class. They look down on the city their predecessors' industries built. They inherit a legacy of practical achievement that stretches from railroad magnates to astronauts.

And occasionally, when the circumstances align, they beat Duke in March.