Vassar College

Vassar College is a private, coeducational, liberal arts college in the town of Poughkeepsie, New York.  Vassar College was founded in 1861 and  is one of the first of the Seven Sisters, a group of historically women’s colleges in the northeast including Mount Holyoke,  Wellesley, Smith, Radcliffe (now part of Harvard), Bryn Mawr and Barnard.

The campus is located on 1000 acres near a residential neighbourhood.  98% of the students live on campus.

Student faculty ratio: 8:1


The 4 year graduation rate is 90%

Vassar is a NCAA Division III institution

The five most popular Majors: Social sciences, Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Visual and performing Arts, Psychology, English Language and Literature/Letters.

Financial Aid and scholarships
Vassar adheres to a need-blind admission policy, which means that admission decisions for all first-year students who are U.S. citizens or permanent residents are made without regard to the student’s financial situation. Vassar meets 100% of the full demonstrated need of all admitted students, international or domestic, for all four years.Applicants should use the FAFSA in the case of American citizens and permanent residents when applying for financial aid and international students would use the CSS Profile.




Vassar does not have a core curriculum. The general curricular requirements are flexible: each student must fulfill the Freshman Course (first-year writing seminar) requirement, the quantitative course requirement, and the foreign language requirement. In addition to these general requirements, the student must fulfill the specific requirements of his/her major. Students choose among 29 departments, 6 interdisciplinary programmes, 12 multidisciplinary programmes and 50 majors.

Vassar-Darmouth Dual Degree programme in Engineering
Under this cooperative program, Vassar students (usually majors in physics, mathematics, or chemistry) spend their junior year at Dartmouth's Thayer School of Engineering. They return to Vassar for their senior year to receive their degrees, and then have the option of returning to Dartmouth for an additional year to earn a general engineering degree.






Notable alumni include computer pioneer Grace Hopper, poet Elizabeth Bishop, actress Meryl Streep, actress Lisa Kudrow and writer-director Noah Baumbach.