Forbes recently released their rankings of “America’s 25 Top Colleges With No Application Fees In 2015”. Click here for the full list and accompanying article, but keep reading for a quick peek at their Top 10 ranked schools:
Wellesley College
Carleton College
Colby College
Kenyon College
Reed College
Smith College
Bryn Mawr College
Grinnell College
Union College
DePauw University
Now, you may be surprised to learn that this post isn’t going to be molded into a commentary on application-fee-free colleges and universities (although with the average application fee being around $40, and with some students applying to ten or more schools, those costs do add up and are worthy of future musings). The above list is actually a round-about and informative way of letting you know how I arrived at today’s 2968 Series school, Bryn Mawr College, in Pennsylvania. I spotted it on Forbes’ list and decided to further investigate. Did you know, for instance, that “bryn mawr” is Welsh for “big hill”? Really! Katharine Hepburn also attended the college in the late 1920s. It’s true! And there’s more…
Bryn Mawr is a women’s liberal arts college that proudly counts itself as one of the “Women’s Ivies”, that is, Seven Sisters Colleges (yes, kind of like the famous Norwegian waterfalls)!
The school has a very interesting history. The college was founded in 1885, its mission being “to offer women rigorous intellectual training and the chance to do to original research, a European-style program that was then available only at a few elite institutions for men.” It was also the first school in the United States to offer fellowships for graduate study to women – cool! A college steeped in history usually has many customs in-place, and Bryn Mawr is no exception. Click here to read about such hallowed traditions as Parade Night, Hell Week, Lantern Night, and May Day!
Academically, the school continues to be a pioneer in many ways, for instance in its blended learning initiative, which focuses on the “combination of online, self-paced learning and face-to-face classroom instruction.” Bryn Mawr also has in-place partnerships with Swarthmore College, the University of Pennsylvania, and Haverford College, allowing its students to enroll in courses at the other three schools – imagine the possibilities for intellectual growth (and click here to read more about it)! Furthermore, the college offers what it calls 360 Course Clusters, which are interdisciplinary experiences involving some non-traditional classroom time and which give students the “opportunity to participate in a cluster of multiple courses connecting students and faculty in a single semester to focus on common problems, themes, and experiences.” All of this, my dear readers, is but a small sample of all that Bryn Mawr has to offer! If you’re curious to learn more about this unique school, why not check out the profile of its incoming class? Or see what niche.com contributors have to say about it? Or check out the college’s profile with Admitster?
If any of the above has made a good impression, and you’re interested in possibly applying to the college, refer back to my earlier post on social media data, wherein I advise that you use your social media presence to show admissions officials at your top-choice schools your enthusiasm. As you can see on Bryn Mawr’s admissions page, the college is on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest. They recommend that you follow them on these social media platforms, and I wholeheartedly agree – the right application strategy can help you to be well informed and to climb the big hill! And hey, if you apply online, there’s no application fee…