I’ve noticed that Amherst has only about 33 majors / areas of study, and less than similar or even smaller Liberal Arts Colleges like Macalester or Swarthmore. With that in mind, how good are the humanities at Amherst? Obviously it is one of the top LACs in the country, but how large is the course selection for someone like me who is interested in the humanities but doesn’t specifically know what they will major in? How large/diverse is the selection NOT including the 5-college consortium opportunities? And if we do count that, to what extent is this consortium an advantage of Amherst and do a lot of students tend to take classes at other colleges? Is this recommended? Thanks!
Go ahead and check it out: https://www.amherst.edu/academiclife/college-catalog
Amherst is one of the top colleges in the nation in terms of graduates going on to get PhDs in the Humanities, particularly in English. Percentage wise, I believe it is second only to the students at the Great Books program at St. John’s College.
The 5 College course offerings are a bonus, not a necessity. You never will be able to exhaust the humanities offerings at Amherst.
^ what he/she said. There are a plethora of classes you can take in each discipline. Amherst is one of the best colleges for humanities; there’s a good reason why we are ranked so highly amongst LAC’s.
We also have an open curriculum, so you will be able to diversify and check out many different options of what to major (or double) major in. The consortium is nice, but usually people don’t use it more than maybe one or two classes unless they are majoring in something that Amherst doesn’t offer (like Finance, for example).
Macalester enrolls quite a few more students than Amherst, so take this into account.
For English, as an example of one humanity, Amherst would appear to be among the very strongest in the nation.
For a few other humanities, depending on the definition of humanities that’s of most interest to you, Amherst’s offerings may, in instances, indeed be slimmer than those of some of its peers. Linguistics and archaeology may be two fields where this would be the case.