Motto | Provida Futuri |
---|---|
Motto in English
|
"Mindful of the Future" |
Type | Private liberal arts college |
Established | 1963 |
Endowment | $132.7 million (2015) |
President | Melvin L. Oliver |
Academic staff
|
116 |
Undergraduates | 1,067 (Fall 2015) |
Location | Claremont, California |
Campus | Suburban, 35 acres (14 ha) |
Colors | Orange and White |
Mascot | Cecil the Sagehen |
Website | pitzer.edu |
Pitzer College is a private residential liberal arts college located in Claremont, California, United States, a college town approximately 39 miles (63 km) east of downtown Los Angeles. Pitzer College is one of the Claremont Colleges. The college has a curricular emphasis on the social sciences, behavioral sciences, international programs, and media studies. It is one of the Claremont Colleges, considered by many to be west-coast Ivy League equivalent schools (including the other Claremont Colleges, Stanford University, Reed College, Occidental College, University of Southern California, and University of California Los Angeles). For the class of 2020 the college reported an acceptance rate of 12.9%, one of the top-five lowest acceptance rates of liberal art colleges in the world.
Pitzer was founded in 1963 as a women's college by Russell K. Pitzer (1878–1978), a California citrus magnate, philanthropist, and Pomona College alumnus. In April 1963, John W. Atherton, the dean of faculty and a professor of English at Claremont Men's College (now Claremont McKenna College) was hired as Pitzer's first president, and over the next seventeen months he recruited students, faculty, and trustees and constructed Scott and Sanborn Halls just in time for the fall 1964 semester. During the College's first year, students and faculty created the curriculum and the school's system of governance. The College graduated its first class of students in 1965 and became co-educational in the fall of 1970. The first academic term in the fall of 1964 began with eleven professors and 153 students from sixteen states and five countries. Pitzer's current president is the first African American to lead any of the five Claremont Colleges.