Academic Life

One of the most esteemed liberal arts colleges in the nation, Mount Holyoke is a vibrant academic community where intellectual rigor and creative thinking are prized. The College offers 48 departmental and interdisciplinary majors, including self-designed majors, such as sociomedical sciences, peace and conflict studies, Arabic studies, and urban anthropology. Our student-to-faculty ratio is 9:1. Eighty-one percent of classes have fewer than 25 students, and 28 percent have fewer than ten students.

Our 200 faculty members are the driving force behind Mount Holyoke's academic excellence. Innovative teachers who are dedicated to their students, they are also active scholars, research scientists, and creative artists. MHC faculty are winners of scholarly awards, including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Dreyfus Foundation, and Guggenheim. Numerous MHC science faculty have won highly competitive CAREER awards from the National Science Foundation; we've also had one Presidential Faculty Fellow and two Presidential Young Investigators. Ninety-six percent of faculty members hold the highest degrees in their field.

Mount Holyoke is a part of Five Colleges, Inc., a consortium that also includes Amherst, Hampshire, and Smith Colleges, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Students may borrow books from all of the Five Colleges and choose from 5,000+ courses at any of the five campuses, which are connected by a free bus. There are two Five College majors-dance and astronomy-and Five College certificate programs in African studies; Asian/Pacific/American studies; culture, health, and science; international relations; Latin American studies; logic; and Middle Eastern studies.