Starting The College Search

College Search & Selection
1

Hi everyone! I’m a junior in high school just starting to seriously look at colleges. I’m very interested in majoring in Classics. (Also, I have toured Yale and I LOVED it!! So if anyone has any inside information on Yale’s Classics major that would be amazing!) I’m also interested in maybe some smaller liberal arts colleges… also maybe a Humanities major. Anyways, thank you in advance for everyone’s help! Below you’ll find my extracurriculars, stats, interests, etc.

Courses:
Freshman Year-
-AP Human Geography
-Pre-AP English 9
-Pre-AP Algebra 2
-Pre-AP Biology
-Pre-AP Latin 3

Sophomore Year-
-AP World History
-Pre-AP English 10
-Pre-AP Pre Calculus & Trig
-Pre-AP Chemistry
-AP Latin 4

Junior Year-
-AP US History
-AP English 11
-AP Calculus B/C
-Pre-AP Physics
-Advanced College Level Latin Course at Local University

Senior Year-
-AP European History
-AP English 12
-Advanced Post Calculus Course at Local University
-Pre-AP Astronony
-Advanced College Level Latin Course at Local University

Extracurriculars-
National Junior Classical League and Latin Club (Nationals)
-Club president
-Paideia Institute Living Latin in Rome

Cello
-School orchestra and local youth orchestra
-Boston Universiry Tanglewood Institute’s Young Artists’ Orchestra and Cello Workshop

Ballet
-Boston Ballet School pre-professional program
-Joffrey summer program

*I spend a lot of my free time following the great books (a lot of the roman and greek classical texts, translating latin and greek), reading, and learning languages (Latin, Greek, French, German, Italian- all near fluent)

Anyways, I’m looking for colleges with an amazing Classics Major- prestige isn’t as much of a factor as somewhere i’ll be happy and intellectually fulfilled, though I would love to know about the more elite universities’ classics majors as well.

Thank you so much!!

2

Here are some LACS known for very strong Classics programs

Reed
College of the Holy Cross
Oberlin
Haverford
Davidson
Kenyon
Bryn Mawr

3

U of Chicago also has a very strong Classics program.

4

@wisteria100 and @menloparkmom Thank you both for your quick responses! I will definitely research the colleges you mentioned. Have a great mother’s day!

5

Lots of good suggestions above. Chicago’s classics department has never been as well-rounded as the classics powerhouses since its classical archaeology offerings have traditionally been lackluster, but they’ve at least hired some ancient art historians recently.

I’ve written about classics programs a lot over the years, as have others. Some past posts:

http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/16471231#Comment_16471231
http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/18792987/#Comment_18792987

If you’re coming in with a good reading knowledge of both Greek and Latin, I recommend looking primarily at universities. Few LACs besides Bryn Mawr/Haverford and perhaps Holy Cross offer sufficient reading courses each semester for someone bypassing the introductory/intermediate courses. Keep in mind that classics courses at even the largest universities will be very small, typically a dozen students or fewer. Humanities courses outside classics are also likely to be small at most colleges.

Virtually all of the Ivies and several other top private universities - particularly Duke, Stanford, and Hopkins - have very strong ancient studies offerings, as do the top publics (Michigan, UNC Chapel Hill, UC Berkeley, UCLA, UT Austin, etc.).

The 2010 NRC rankings for classics seem reasonably accurate to me (each “rank” is a range rather than a single score). There are some terrific undergraduate options not on this list (e.g. NYU, Arizona, Notre Dame, Boston College, Tulane, Penn State, and Florida State, among others), but it can serve as a starting point.

1-6 Stanford
1-8 Harvard
1-11 Penn
1-15 Columbia
2-11 Princeton
2-15 Duke
2-17 Berkeley
3-14 UNC Chapel Hill
5-19 Brown
5-22 UT Austin
6-19 Michigan
7-22 Cincinnati
9-21 Yale
9-26 Cornell
10-25 UCLA
11-26 Ohio State
13-29 Wisconsin
14-28 Johns Hopkins
15-28 USC
15-29 Bryn Mawr
16-29 Minnesota
16-31 Washington
18-30 Iowa
20-31 Chicago
21-31 Indiana
21-31 Missouri
25-31 SUNY Buffalo

Caveat: There are differences between these programs that aren’t reflected in a one-size-fits-all ranking. Some departments are very strong in Greek/Latin linguistics and comparative Indo-European studies, for example (Harvard, UCLA, Cornell), whereas others are archaeology powerhouses (Brown, Berkeley, Penn, Stanford) or strong in one or more subfields like papyrology (Princeton, Columbia, Duke, Michigan) or Bronze Age Aegean studies (UT Austin and Cincinnati).

6

@warblersrule - thank you for the info above. I was intending to post a similar request for suggestions for my classics-loving daughter, tagging you and @LoveTheBard. @oliviashepherd27 - you saved me some time, thanks! good luck in your search!

7

Should you want to go public, but not to a huge school, you should consider UMBC’s Ancient Studies program. I’m an alum (1979), and at one time it was one of the largest classics programs in the country. By that I mean fewer than 20 declared majors in the program at any given time. UMBC has had a remarkably stable faculty–some of the profs still there were started out as I was winding up my time. I’ve also heard good things about JHU’s and Tufts’ programs. You might want to check some faculty websites to find where they did their undergrad.

Good luck to you. I’ve never worked in the field, but don’t think I’ve ever learned so much valuable stuff.

8

Hello everyone! Thank you so much for all of the responses, they will definitely help me in my college search.

9

Tufts does not have a phd program in classics, so it will not show up on any of the university rankings. It does have a masters program, though.

My background is in computing, so I am not qualified to speak to the breadth of the program, (@warblersrule could) but I can attest to the fact that they are leaders in the emerging area of Digital Humanities.

They created an on-line data base of the classical world in 1987 (before the advent of the World Wide Web). This database is mirrored by U Chicago and the Max Planck Society in Berlin. The University of Leipzig is a major collaborator. The National Research Council of Italy, the Center for Hellenic Studies, Holy Cross, UMass, Furman, University of Missouri, and Mount Allison also have funded collaborations.

http://perseus.uchicago.edu/
http://www.digitalmeetsculture.net/article/perseus-digital-library-for-humanities-and-more/
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/

More recently, the advent of Natural Language Processing (NLP), Machine Learning (ML), and other Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques, has enabled research projects on these digitized classical items that are well beyond the scope of unassisted humans. This is a great way for people who are passionate about the classics to learn how to apply leading edge computing technologies and can be a bridge to a lucrative career in Data Science. Tufts offers a new masters program in Digital Humanities, but all the coursework is available to undergrads and the computer related courses have little to no prerequisites.

https://tuftsdaily.com/features/2016/11/29/new-course-highlights-growing-academic-recognition-digital-humanities/
http://ase.tufts.edu/classics/graduate/digitalTools.htm

https://www.cs.tufts.edu/t/courses/description/fall2018/COMP/05-01
https://www.cs.tufts.edu/t/courses/description/fall2018/COMP/150-01