Sarah Lawrence College

Founded in 1924, Sarah Lawrence College is a co-educational, four-year liberal arts college located in Bronxville, New York. It has a student population of 1,200 and is notable for its strong writing and performance art departments. Long a women-only institution, Sarah Lawrence first opened its doors to men in 1969. Alumni include Lesley Gore, Carly Simon, Joanne Woodward, Julianna Margulies, Jill Clayburgh, Tia Leone, Holly Robinson, Robin Givens, Brian De Palma, and Alice Walker. Yoko Ono attended, but did not graduate. Joseph Campbell was a professor at Sarah Lawrence.

Sarah Lawrence is renowned for its low student-to-faculty ratio (it is currently 6:1) and its slightly nontraditional approach to academics. At the undergraduate level, Sarah Lawrence offers a Bachelor of Arts degree where, instead of traditional majors, students take a wide variety of courses in four different divisions: the creative arts (e.g., creative writing, dance, theater, painting), history and the social sciences (e.g., anthropology, political science, sociology), humanities (e.g., Asian studies, art history, languages, religion), and natural science and mathematics (e.g., biology, chemistry, physics). Each student is assigned to a faculty advisor, known as a don, to plan a course of study. Most courses (apart from the performing arts) consist of two parts: the seminar, limited to 15 students, and the conference, a private, bi-weekly meeting with a seminar professor. In conference, students develop individual projects that extend the course material and link it to their personal interests. Sarah Lawrence has no required courses and traditional examinations have been replaced, in most courses, with writing final research papers and essays.