Vassar College

Based on Wikipedia: Vassar College

The School That Said No to Yale

In the late 1960s, Yale University came calling with an extraordinary offer: merge with us, become part of the Ivy League. Vassar College, then a women-only institution in the Hudson Valley, did something remarkable. It said no.

Instead of dissolving into one of America's most prestigious universities, Vassar chose to go coeducational on its own terms, opening its doors to male students in 1969 while remaining an independent liberal arts college. It was a decision that would have seemed absurd to the school's founder, a brewer named Matthew Vassar who had explicitly created a college for women over a century earlier.

But that rejection of Yale tells you something essential about Vassar's character: this is an institution that has always charted its own course, even when the conventional path would have been easier or more prestigious.

A Brewer's Revolutionary Idea

Matthew Vassar made his fortune in beer. In the mid-nineteenth century, his brewery in Poughkeepsie, New York, was one of the largest in America. But Vassar wanted to be remembered for something more lasting than ale.

In 1861, he chartered a college for women—only the second degree-granting institution of higher education for women in the entire United States. He called it, with the directness of a businessman, "Vassar Female College."

The name lasted exactly one year.

Vassar himself had the word "Female" removed, which prompted some locals in Poughkeepsie to joke that the old brewer expected his school might someday admit men. It would take more than a century, but they were right.

The college's first president was Milo P. Jewett, who arrived with ten professors and twenty-one instructors. But the most significant early appointment came in 1865, when Vassar hired Maria Mitchell as its first faculty member. Mitchell was an astronomer—and not just any astronomer. She had discovered a comet in 1847, becoming the first American woman to do so, and had been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her presence at Vassar signaled that this would not be a finishing school for young ladies. It would be a serious academic institution.

The Architecture of Ambition

When Vassar opened, it did so in a building that was, quite literally, the largest in the United States by floor space.

Main Building, designed by James Renwick Jr.—the same architect who designed the Smithsonian Institution—housed the entire college under one roof: classrooms, dormitories, the museum, the library, dining halls, everything. It stands today at the center of campus, one of the finest examples of Second Empire architecture in America, with its distinctive mansard roof and the confident grandeur of an institution that expected to matter.

The campus now sprawls across more than a thousand acres and includes over a hundred buildings. It is also, officially, an arboretum, featuring more than two hundred species of trees, a native plant preserve, and a 530-acre ecological preserve. Both Main Building and the original observatory that preceded it on campus are National Historic Landmarks.

In 1958, the college added a building that stands in deliberate contrast to all that Victorian confidence. The Emma Hartman Noyes House, designed by the Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen, is a starkly modernist dormitory curved around a large green. Saarinen had designed several dormitories for Vassar, but only this one was ever built. The high cost and structural problems with the windows convinced administrators to leave it at one rather than completing the planned circular complex.

The building's common area has become famous for its futuristic design, hosting regular readings and concerts. And in the 1960s and 1970s, Noyes House was home to something wonderfully improbable: an all-female football team called the Noyes Nymphs, who competed against Ivy League teams.

The Seven Sisters and the Protestant Establishment

Vassar was the second of what became known as the Seven Sisters—a group of elite women's colleges that served as counterparts to the all-male Ivy League. The others were Mount Holyoke, Wellesley, Smith, Radcliffe, Bryn Mawr, and Barnard.

These institutions occupied a particular place in American society. As the sociologist E. Digby Baltzell noted, "upper-class WASP families educated their children at colleges such as Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and Vassar." The acronym WASP stands for White Anglo-Saxon Protestant—the ethnic and religious group that dominated American economic and political life from the colonial era through much of the twentieth century.

At Vassar, a select few students were allowed entry into the school's secret society, Delta Sigma Rho, founded in 1922. Among those connected to the college was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who served as a Trustee before becoming President of the United States.

But the exclusivity of the Seven Sisters—and the gender segregation they represented—began to seem like a relic after World War II. Vassar briefly accepted male students on the G.I. Bill in the immediate postwar years, a small crack in the wall. By the late 1960s, the pressure for change was immense.

Yale's merger offer would have been the easy solution. Instead, Vassar chose independence and coeducation. Today, the student body is roughly 56 percent women and 44 percent men, which is actually close to the national average for liberal arts colleges. About 2,450 students attend, and 98 percent of them live on campus.

What Gets Studied Here

Vassar offers bachelor's degrees in more than fifty majors, taught by over 336 faculty members. The student-to-faculty ratio is eight to one, and the average class has just seventeen students. Virtually all faculty members hold doctoral degrees or their equivalent.

The most popular majors, based on recent graduates, paint an interesting picture: Biology and Biological Sciences lead the list, followed by Economics, Political Science and Government, English Language and Literature, Biochemistry, Neuroscience, and Computer and Information Sciences. It is a mix of the practical and the humanistic, the scientific and the literary.

The college maintains one of the largest undergraduate library collections in the country—about one million volumes spread across eight libraries, plus extensive special collections including papers from the chemist Ellen Swallow Richards, the physicist Albert Einstein, and the writers Mary McCarthy and Elizabeth Bishop. Vassar has been a Federal Depository library for selected United States Government documents since 1943.

Getting In

Vassar has become increasingly selective. For the class entering in fall 2023, the college received 12,145 applications and accepted just 17.7 percent of them—roughly one in six applicants.

The students who do get in tend to be exceptional. Among those who submitted standardized test scores, the combined average SAT score was 1489 out of 1600, and the average ACT composite was 33 out of 36. Seventy-nine percent of admitted students whose high schools provided rankings were in the top ten percent of their graduating class.

The student body has grown more diverse over time. Students of color make up 32 to 38 percent of recent freshman classes. International students from over sixty countries constitute 8 to 10 percent of enrollment. In 2007, Vassar returned to a need-blind admissions policy, meaning the admissions office evaluates applications without regard to whether students can afford to pay full tuition.

About 60 percent of Vassar students come from public high schools; the remaining 40 percent attended private schools, both independent and religious.

Rankings and Their Discontents

In the 2025 edition of U.S. News and World Report's college rankings, Vassar tied for twelfth among liberal arts colleges in the United States. The college has ranked as high as tenth in previous years. Other rankings have placed it highly for financial aid, value, and contribution to economic mobility.

But Catharine Bond Hill, who served as Vassar's president from 2006 to 2016, offered a useful caution about such rankings. "Rankings will always be limited in what they can tell consumers," she wrote. "Part of higher education's role about the rankings should be to remind students and their families that these are only one piece of information that they should take into account in deciding where to go to college. Intangibles will and should play a role in these decisions."

What the rankings do capture is that Vassar graduates tend to continue their education. Over half pursue advanced study within five years of graduation, including one-fifth who go immediately to graduate school. In 2017, 76 percent of Vassar seniors who applied to medical school were accepted; for law school, the acceptance rate was 96 percent.

The Rhythms of Campus Life

Living at Vassar means living in one of nine residence halls, each with its own character. Main House occupies the upper floors of the original Main Building. Strong House, constructed in 1893, was designated all-women's housing after coeducation began; it now also accepts nonbinary and gender-nonconforming students.

A cluster of Elizabethan-style houses—Raymond, Lathrop, and Davison—forms a residential quadrangle. Jewett House, a nine-story Tudor-style dormitory, anchors the north end. Most fourth-year students move into on-campus apartments: the Terrace Apartments, the Town Houses, or South Commons.

There is also Ferry House, a cooperative where twenty students share responsibilities for cooking and cleaning, a remnant of an older, more communal vision of college life.

The annual highlight of the Vassar calendar is Founder's Day, a campus festival held each spring in late April or early May. It began as a surprise birthday party for Matthew Vassar's seventy-fourth birthday and evolved into something much larger—originally lectures, then plays and pageants, eventually circus and fair activities, and now a two-day music festival with themes that have ranged from Alice in Wonderland to Nintendo to Candyland.

A Cappella and Beyond

Vassar has an unusually rich tradition of student performance groups, particularly in a cappella singing. The Night Owls, established in the 1940s, are one of the oldest collegiate a cappella groups still performing in the United States. They are one of nine vocal groups at Vassar, each with its own specialty: the Vastards focus on music from the 2000s, Broadway and More (known as BAM) performs showtunes, Beauty and the Beats takes on Disney songs, and AirCappella is an all-whistling ensemble.

Theater runs equally deep. The Philaletheis Society, founded in 1865 as a literary society, is the oldest theater group on campus. It is now entirely student-run. Other troupes include Unbound for experimental theater, Woodshed for devised theater, Ebony Theatre Ensemble for Black theater, and two Shakespeare-specific groups. The college also hosts the Powerhouse Summer Theater workshop series.

Comedy has its place too. Happily Ever Laughter, known as HEL, has been performing sketch comedy since 1993. Other groups have come and gone, including one called Laughingstock, whose recognition was withdrawn by the student assembly in March 2000 following a controversial sketch—a reminder that even at a liberal arts college, comedy can be a dangerous business.

The Brewers Take the Field

Vassar's varsity sports teams compete in NCAA Division III as members of the Liberty League. Their nickname—the Brewers—is a direct tribute to the college's founder and his fortune-making profession.

It is a fitting name for an institution that has always had a certain irreverence about itself, a willingness to acknowledge where it came from while becoming something its founder could never have imagined: a coeducational college that once said no to Yale, where the children of the Protestant establishment now study alongside students from sixty countries, and where the largest building in nineteenth-century America still stands at the center of a thousand-acre arboretum in the Hudson Valley.

A Place That Chooses Its Own Path

Vassar's story is, in some ways, a story about American higher education itself: founded in an era when women were largely excluded from serious academic study, shaped by the social hierarchies of the Protestant establishment, transformed by the upheavals of the 1960s, and now navigating the complicated terrain of selective admissions, financial aid, and the question of what a liberal arts education is actually for.

But it is also a story about institutional character. Vassar has made unconventional choices at crucial moments—hiring Maria Mitchell when women scientists were practically unheard of, turning down Yale when merger was the path of least resistance, returning to need-blind admissions when many peer institutions were moving away from it.

The brewer who founded this place wanted to do something that would last longer than ale. He succeeded, though the institution he created has become something he could never have predicted. Perhaps that is the nature of any worthwhile legacy: you set something in motion, and then it takes on a life of its own.