Goucher College

Goucher College is a private, co-educational, liberal arts college located in the northern Baltimore suburb of Towson in unincorporated Baltimore County, Maryland, on a 287-acre (1.2 km²) campus. The school has approximately 1,475 undergraduate students studying in 31 majors and six interdisciplinary programs and about 900 students studying in graduate subjects. It was one of the first colleges to embrace internships and allow its students to take a more individualized approach. In 2004, Newsweek called Goucher the college with the happiest students.

Recently, Goucher College has instituted a study-abroad requirement—each undergraduate must complete at least one study-abroad experience. To help students fulfill this requirement, the college offers a wide range of three-week "intensive courses abroad," as well as semester and year-long programs, in concert with vouchers of $1,200 to subsidize the costs.

History

The school was founded in 1885 as a women's college, by Methodist ministers Dr. John Goucher and John B. Van Meter, with the assistance of Goucher's wife Mary Cecilia Fisher Goucher. Originally called The Woman's College of Baltimore, the school was renamed in 1910 in honor of its founding members and benefactors.

The original campus was in the southern part of what is now the Charles Village neighborhood in Baltimore City. Goucher moved to its present suburban location in 1953. The college has been co-educational since 1986.

Campus demographics

Female students still predominate on the undergraduate level at about 67%. This number is higher at the graduate level, where almost 81% of the students are female. About 11.5% of the undergraduate population are either African-American, Asian, Hispanic or Native-American. At the graduate level, the number is about 8.5%. Two of the most popular majors are communications and psychology. Politically, most students lean toward the Democratic side of the spectrum. U.S. News and World Report ranked Goucher college #93 in its annual rankings of national liberal arts colleges, tied with Albion College in Michigan, Bennington College in Vermont, and Hampshire College in Massachusetts. Its most well-known faculty members include Dr. Jean H. Baker and Dr. Julie Roy Jeffery of the History Department; President Sanford J. Ungar; and the writer Madison Smartt Bell, who oversees the college's Kratz Center for Creative Writing. Goucher is one of 40 schools profiled in the book Colleges That Change Lives by Loren Pope. Goucher also participates in the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities (NAICU)'s University and College Accountability Network (U-CAN).

Goucher College is a private, co-educational, liberal arts college located in the northern Baltimore suburb of Towson in unincorporated Baltimore County, Maryland, on a 287-acre (1.2 km²) campus. The school has approximately 1,475 undergraduate students studying in 31 majors and six interdisciplinary programs and about 900 students studying in graduate subjects. It was one of the first colleges to embrace internships and allow its students to take a more individualized approach. In 2004, Newsweek called Goucher the college with the happiest students.