Good Colleges for Humanities majors (safeties/matches = NOT top ranked schools)

College Search & Lists
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Everyone can easily list great ‘top’/‘reach’ schools for Humanities majors - Kenyon, Hamilton for writing, Holy Cross for Classics… - but what about colleges that’d be matches or safeties, and have strong Humanities programs/departments/students + administration reasonably supportive of Humanities (History, Foreign Language, English, Classics, Philosophy, Art History)? What if you extend the field to Geography and Political science?
Could be LACs or public universities (either directionals or not-very-selective flagship).
Don’t have to be strong across the board - can be strong in only one field of the Humanities; in that case, indicate or complete if an earlier mention is too narrow.

St John’s = Great Books
Eckerd = writing
Wooster = in general?
…???

2

College of Charleston

3

The New School: English, art.

4

Beloit - Anthro (not Humanities but worth mentioning)

5

One we have recently started researching (interested in but no personal knowledge) is Truman State. They seem to have a strong humanities focus while being affordable.

6

Gettysburg, American History and English/Writing

St. Anselm, Political Science

St. Bonaventure, Philosophy & Writing via the Journalism School and English Department

7

Aren’t Geography and political science usually seen as social studies? Isn’t history seen as both humanities and social studies?

It does not seem to be that hard to find less selective colleges with good (for example) English offerings:
http://www.csub.edu/english/Courses/index.html

However, it is certainly possible that specific colleges may have English departments mainly focused on remedial and frosh level writing instruction, with fewer offerings for English literature majors and others looking for English literature electives. So it may be worth it for prospective students to look at the departments of interest to see what they offer.

8

“It does not seem to be that hard to find less selective colleges with good (for example) English offerings”

Some less selective schools that are not talked about have heavily awarded students in some fields. For example, out of 28 schools eligible to submit essays for the Jim Murray Foundation, about 20% have been won by St. Bonaventure students, which has produced 7 Pulitzer Prize winning journalists and has one of the top and longest running literary magazines and one the top student newspapers. So, there are some schools that punch significantly harder than peers or what selectivity would suggest.

9

Bard, Fordham.

St. John’s (OP) does report SAT scores (1200-1440) that are comparable to colleges with lower acceptance rates.

10

Looks like lots of non-flagship state universities have extensive English literature offerings. Examples:
https://www.umb.edu/academics/cla/english/ug/courses
http://www.ncat.edu/divisions/academic-affairs/bulletin/2012-2014/academic-info-and-regs/cas/dept-of-english/
http://catalog.utep.edu/undergrad/course-descriptions/engl/
http://catalog.odu.edu/courses/engl/

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^okay, I’ll be more precise.
Do you know a college with Humanities offerings that are especially good (across the board, even if the college
The list of classes is pretty meaningless since it doesn’t mean the class is discussion-based, how many students are enrolled, how much is read, how much discussion time is devoted to interpretation (vs. summarizing and explaining), how often the classes are offered, how strongly supported the Humanities majors at the Career center, by professors, by the grant writing office, how respected Humanities are on campus, whether there’s a sizable number of majors compared to more “vocational” majors, etc.
For instance, if you look at UT Dallas students enrolled in Honors, you’ll see fewer than 5% of them are in Arts/Humanities. The vast majority is majoring in Engineering, Math, CS, Economics. Does UTD offer English classes? Sure. Is it a good school for English majors? Probably not. (It is, in fact, known as a “STEM school”.)

The idea of this thread is to compile a list of not very selective programs that’d be appealing to Humanities majors. I added Geography and Political Science because while they’re social sciences, they don’t have the direct “vocational” link to jobs that Economics majors may have, or GIS, or social work, or psychology.

Do you know programs that are good - either from having family members, friends, friends’ children, neighbors’ children, students… attend them, or from professional encounters, or any other way?
Please add to the thread. :slight_smile:

For instance, do you know some strong programs where UTEP or ODU or NC A&T especially shine?
What CSU would be best for a serious English major or a Chinese major? Among UCSC, UCR, UCM, is one better for a History major? For Philosophy? For Spanish or Russian or German?

12

University of North Carolina Wilmington for Creative Writing. The only publishing lab in the state of North Carolina.

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I mentioned Truman State bc my dd is interested in their foreign language dept which appears to be quite good.

14

Robert E Cook Honors program at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.
http://www.iup.edu/honors/
http://www.iup.edu/honors/core/

15

For anecdotes, there was a (deceased unfortunately) tenure track faculty member in English at Yale who earned his bachelor’s degree at CSU Bakersfield before earning a PhD at UCLA.

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I believe Washington College in Chesterstown, MD is strong in the humanities, especially writing http://www.washcoll.edu/

17

University of Iowa for Creative Writing
http://www.english.uiowa.edu/undergraduate-program/creative-writing-track

18

Sarah Lawrence, Sewanee: writing.

19

Boston University has a Core Curriculum program that is similar to that of Columbia and UChicago, and a strong English department.

20

Boston University is more selective than I was thinking.