Amherst College

Amherst, MA
Boltwood Avenue, Amherst, MA 01002-5000
413-542-2000

Amherst College is a private liberal arts college in Amherst, Massachusetts. 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 Lord Jeffery Amherst. It was initially established as a men's college and became coeducational in 1975. Amherst is an exclusively undergraduate four-year institution and enrolled 1,849 students in the fall of 2016. Students choose courses from 38 major programs in an open curriculum and are not required to study a core curriculum or fulfill any distribution requirements. For the class of 2020, Amherst received 8,406 applications and accepted 1,149 (13.6%) students.

Amherst College has historically had close relationships and rivalries with Williams College and Wesleyan University, which form the Little Three colleges. The college is a member of the Five Colleges consortium, which allows its students to attend classes at four other Pioneer Valley institutions: Mount Holyoke College, Smith College, Hampshire College, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. With an endowment of $2.2 billion, Amherst is the wealthiest college in Massachusetts. In a 2017 ranking of U.S. colleges and universities by Forbes magazine, Amherst was ranked the 6th wealthiest, with an average student debt of $10,438 and an endowment per student of $1,153,000.

Amherst has produced alumni of distinction in many fields, including politics, the sciences, the humanities, the arts, and business. As of 2019, Amherst alumni include two Nobel laureates, one Fields Medalist, three Pulitzer Prize winners, one Turing Award winner, two National Humanities Medalists, two National Academy of Sciences members, and one U.S. Supreme Court justice. Other notable alumni include 19 Rhodes Scholars, 16 Marshall Scholars, 13 Pulitzer Prize winners, 10 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 8 MacArthur Fellows, 6 MacArthur Genius Award winners, and 6 National Medal of Science winners.



Quick Facts

Enrollment: 1745

Acceptance Rate: 11.83%

Type: Private not-for-profit, 4-year or above

Main Website: https://www.amherst.edu/

Financial Aid: https://www.amherst.edu/offices/financialaid

Annual Costs

Total Cost In-State On-Campus: $79600

Total Cost Out-State On-Campus: $79600

Return on Investment Rating

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The estimated cost for four years as an undergraduate at Amherst College is $266277.68. This includes the average cost of attendance for four years plus the interest on the average loan over a ten year repayment minus the average of grants and scholarships per student.

We then contrast this figure with average early-career and mid-career average incomes of graduates of four year programs at Amherst College. For graduates of Amherst College, we saw an average early-career income of $68700.00 and mid-career income of $133400.00. We then ranked the school's value based on how many years of mid-career income it takes to repay the educational costs.