Liberal arts colleges in the United States in the context of "Amherst Academy"

Bowdoin College (/ˈboʊdɪn/ BOH-din) is a private liberal arts college in Brunswick, Maine, United States. It was chartered in 1794.

In addition to its Brunswick campus, Bowdoin owns a 118-acre (48 ha) coastal studies center on Orr's Island and a 200-acre (81 ha) scientific field station on Kent Island in the Bay of Fundy.

Tufts University is a private research university in Medford and Somerville, Massachusetts, United States, with additional facilities in Boston and Grafton, as well as Talloires, France. It was founded in 1852 as Tufts College by Christian universalists who sought to provide a nonsectarian institution of higher learning. For much of the 20th century, Jackson College for Women was the coordinate college of Tufts. Tufts remained a small liberal arts college until the 1970s, when it became a larger research university offering doctorates in several disciplines.

Tufts enrolls over 13,000 students. It offers over 90 undergraduate and 160 graduate programs across ten schools in the greater Boston area and from a campus in France. It has the country's oldest graduate school of international relations, the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. The largest school is the School of Arts and Sciences, which includes both the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, which is affiliated with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The School of Engineering offers an entrepreneurial focus through its Gordon Institute. It is classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity" and is a member of the Association of American Universities.

Pomona College (/pəˈmoʊnə/ pə-MOH-nə) is a private liberal arts college in Claremont, California. It was established in 1887 by a group of Congregationalists who wanted to recreate a "college of the New England type" in Southern California. In 1925, it became the founding member of the Claremont Colleges consortium of adjacent, affiliated institutions.

Pomona is a four-year undergraduate institution that enrolls approximately 1,700 students. It offers 48 majors in liberal arts disciplines and roughly 650 courses, as well as access to more than 2,000 additional courses at the other Claremont Colleges. Its 140-acre (57 ha) campus is in a residential community 35 miles (56 km) east of downtown Los Angeles, near the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains.

Auburn University (informally known as AU or Auburn) is a public land-grant research university in Auburn, Alabama, United States. With more than 27,900 undergraduate students, over 6,200 graduate students, and a total enrollment of more than 34,100 students with 1,435 faculty members, Auburn is the second-largest university in Alabama. It is one of the state's two flagship public universities. The university is one of 146 U.S. universities classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity".

Auburn was chartered in 1856, as East Alabama Male College, a private liberal arts college affiliated with the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. In 1872, under the Morrill Act, it became the state's first land-grant university and was renamed the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Alabama. In 1892, it became the first four-year coeducational school in Alabama and in 1899 was renamed Alabama Polytechnic Institute. In 1960, its name was changed to Auburn University.

Amherst College (/ˈæmərst/ AM-ərst) is a private liberal arts college in Amherst, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1821 as an attempt to relocate Williams College by its then-president Zephaniah Swift Moore, Amherst is the third oldest institution of higher education in Massachusetts. The institution was named after the town, which in turn had been named after Jeffery, Lord Amherst, Commander-in-Chief of British forces of North America during the French and Indian War. Originally established as a men's college, Amherst became coeducational in 1975.

Amherst is an exclusively undergraduate four-year institution; 1,914 full-time students were enrolled in fall 2024. Admissions are highly selective. Students choose courses from 42 major programs in an open curriculum and are not required to study a core curriculum or fulfill any distribution requirements; students may also design their own interdisciplinary major.

Occidental College (informally Oxy) is a private liberal arts college in Los Angeles, California, United States. Founded in 1887 as a coeducational college by clergy and members of the Presbyterian Church, it became non-sectarian in 1910. It is one of the oldest liberal arts colleges on the West Coast of the United States.

Occidental's current 120-acre (49 ha) campus is located in Eagle Rock, Los Angeles, and was designed by architect Myron Hunt. Due to its proximity to Hollywood and its architecture, the campus is frequently used as a filming location for film and television productions. Occidental is a founding member of the Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference and its 20 varsity sports teams compete in NCAA Division III. The college's curriculum emphasizes diversity, global literacy, and civic engagement.

Whittier College is a private liberal arts college in Whittier, California. It is a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) and, as of fall 2025, had 797 undergraduate and graduate students. It was founded in 1887. Whittier offers one graduate degree – a master's degree in education.

Williams College is a private liberal arts college in Williamstown, Massachusetts, United States. It was established as a men's college in 1793 with funds from the estate of Ephraim Williams, a colonist from the Province of Massachusetts Bay who was killed in the French and Indian War in 1755.

Williams's main campus is located in Williamstown, in the Berkshires in rural northwestern Massachusetts, and contains more than 100 academic, athletic, and residential buildings. There are 360 voting faculty members, with a student-to-faculty ratio of 6:1. As of 2022, the college had an enrollment of 2,021 undergraduate students and 50 graduate students.

A liberal arts college or liberal arts institution of higher education is a college with an emphasis on undergraduate study in the liberal arts of humanities and science. Such colleges aim to impart a broad general knowledge and develop general intellectual capacities, in contrast to a professional or vocational curriculum. Students in a liberal arts college generally major in a particular discipline while receiving exposure to a wide range of academic subjects. Although it draws on European antecedents, the liberal arts college is strongly associated with American higher education, and most liberal arts colleges around the world draw explicitly on the American model.

There is no formal definition of a liberal arts college, but one American authority defines them as schools that "emphasize undergraduate education and award at least half of their degrees in the liberal arts fields of study". Other researchers have adopted similar definitions.