One of America’s Best Colleges

• Pitzer College is ranked 36th of 215 liberal arts colleges in academic reputation and as having the 38th lowest acceptance rate among the top-tier liberal arts colleges, according to U.S.News & World Report
• Pitzer College has begun the largest construction project since its founding with new residence halls that are socially and environmentally responsible and that are being built to the strict standards of the U.S. Green Building Council. The College stands positioned to become one of the first colleges in the nation to replace all of its residence halls with LEED (Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design) gold-certified residence halls.
• Eighteen Pitzer College students received prestigious Fulbright Program Fellowships in 2006, a national record for colleges its size, totaling thirty-four awards for the past three years. Other student awards for 2006 included a Harry S. Truman scholar, a Thomas J. Watson fellow, a McNair scholar, a Coro fellow, a Kemper Foundation scholar, a Jack Kent Cooke Foundation graduate scholar, and a Rotary International Ambassadorial scholar.
• Pitzer ranks as the fifth most diverse private coeducational top-tier liberal arts college in America by U.S. News, with students of color representing 32 percent of the student body.
• According to U.S. News, Pitzer ranks 21st in the top tier of 110 liberal arts schools for the percentage of students studying abroad. Pitzer College’s thirty-five international and domestic exchange programs make it possible for students to study abroad for more than one semester.
• Pitzer College is one of seventy-six colleges or universities that has been selected by The Carnegie Foundation for their new elective Community Engagement Classification.
• Pitzer is included in The Princeton Review’s The Best 361 Colleges, which named the College as one of the “Best in the West.” Pitzer was one of 129 schools profiled in the first edition of The Best Western Colleges, and one of five profiled in the regional guidebook series.
• Pitzer College is one of the nation’s most effective schools fostering social responsibility and public service, according to The Princeton Review and Campus Compact. Pitzer College is one of eighty-one institutions in thirty-three states that The Princeton Review commends and features in its book, Colleges with a Conscience: 81 Great Schools with Outstanding Community Involvement.
• Pitzer has the nation’s third best faculty, eighth most politically active students, and was ranked eighth for lots of race/class interaction in The Princeton Review’s The Best 361 Colleges.
• In Kaplan Publishing’s The Unofficial, Unbiased Insider’s Guide to the 328 Most Interesting Colleges, Pitzer is cited as offering “the most creative curriculum of all The Claremont Colleges.”
• The College is a member of the Consortium for Innovative Environments in Learning (CIEL), a group of the most progressive colleges working to reinvigorate American higher education.
• Pitzer is cited by the National Wildlife Foundation as one of the foremost schools in the country for Environmental Studies.
• The Fiske Guide to Colleges lauds Pitzer’s strong Media Studies
  program.
• The Claremont Colleges Debate Union, in which Pitzer students participate, ranked eighth out of four hundred teams at the national debate championship.
• Pitzer offers ten men’s and ten women’s intercollegiate athletic teams. Pitzer students also participate in The Claremont Colleges Club sports programs, which compete nationally.
  

Outstanding Joint Science Program

Pitzer, Claremont McKenna and Scripps Colleges share an interdisciplinary Joint Science Department housed in the state-of-the-art W. M. Keck Science Center. From 2002 to 2006, nearly 78 percent of Joint Science students who applied were admitted to medical school. By contrast, the national average acceptance rate is 43 percent.

Exceptional Media Studies Program

Pitzer College is the lead Claremont College for Media Studies. Pitzer’s own Media Studies program appeals to socially committed artists and showcases grass-roots filmmaking at its best. Professor Jesse Lerner was awarded a Fulbright-Garcia Robles Fellowship for 2006–07. Films by three Pitzer Media Studies professors have been featured at the Sundance Film Festival. Other works by Pitzer professors: Alexandra Juhasz and Jesse Lerner co-edited F is for Phony, a study on fake documentary practice and theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press); Alexandra Juhasz made “Video Remains,” an experimental video in the film festival circuit; and Ming-Yuen Ma was a Surdna Foundation Distinguished Visiting Artist in Film and Visual Arts, California State Summer School for The Arts (CSSSA).

Major Student Awards

Pitzer student awards earned from 2001 to 2006:

• Forty-four Fulbright Program Fellowships
• Four Thomas J. Watson Fellowships
• Two Freeman Foundation Asia Fellowships
• Four Rotary Ambassadorial Scholarships
• One Woodrow Wilson Foundation Fellowship
• One Morris K. Udall Foundation Native American Congressional Internship
• Four Coro Fellowships
• Three Kemper Foundation Scholarships
• One Jack Kent Cooke Foundation Graduate Scholarship
• Two American Sociological Association Minority Fellowships
• One Teaching Assistantship Fellow from the French government (selected by the Institute of International Education)
• One Rudolph Polk Memorial Award in Music

Pitzer students enjoy a strong tradition of receiving major fellowships and scholarships. One Pitzer student has received the Rhodes scholarship and six additional students have been finalists. In 2006, eighteen Pitzer College students were awarded Fulbright grants to continue in their fields of study—a record for colleges of fewer than one thousand students for the fourth consecutive year. Since 1997, Pitzer students have won five Thomas J. Watson Fellowships, seven Rotary Ambassadorial Scholarships, six Freeman Foundation Asia Fellowships, five American Sociological Association Minority Fellowships (the highest number among colleges and universities in the U.S.), one Morris K. Udall Foundation Native American Congressional Internship, and one Woodrow Wilson Foundation Fellowship.

Highly Selective

Pitzer College had the 38th lowest acceptance rate among the top-tier liberal arts colleges for its Fall 2005 entering class, according to U.S. News rankings. Fewer than thirty national liberal arts colleges have acceptance rates less than 40 percent as Pitzer did in Fall 2005. The 2005–06 academic year set an all-time record for number of applications to Pitzer, and showed an increase for the eighth consecutive year.

Year in Review Sports

Women’s soccer won the Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (SCIAC) Championship and advanced to the NCAA Championships for the first time in program history. Men’s Cross Country won their third consecutive Conference Championship. The football team ranked first in the Conference in pass defense and second in total defense. Women’s softball recorded the most wins ever this year in school history. Women’s tennis finished second in the Conference and qualified for the NCAA Regionals. A men’s tennis doubles team recorded wins over the first and third ranked doubles teams in the country. The golf team was undefeated in dual matches in the Conference. The women’s water polo team finished second in the Conference.

LEFT: The Sagehen football team ranked first in the Conference in pass defense and second in total defense. RIGHT: The Sagehen women’s soccer team won the Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (SCIAC) Championship and advanced to the NCAA Championships for the first time in program history.

Innovative Community Service & Outreach

Pitzer College’s focus on social responsibility and community service provides students with a plethora of volunteer opportunities on and off campus. Among the many programs offered through the Center for California Cultural and Social Issues (CCCSI), Pitzer students have the opportunity to conduct reading groups with women in recovery, tutor homeless and at-risk young children, or help juvenile offenders improve their literacy skills at area probation camps. CCCSI is also home to the Pitzer in Ontario (California) program, which offers a fifteen-hour per week internship, rigorous training in applied research methods, and a theoretical and topical framework through which to understand pressing social and urban issues in the Southern California region.

Pitzer College faculty offer course-related projects in community-based Spanish; early academic outreach; and the Leadership in Environmental Education Partnership (LEEP). Another community service program is Jumpstart, a national nonprofit outreach program that pairs college students with preschool-age children struggling in the areas of communication, literacy and social skills. The highly successful Jumpstart pilot program begun at Pitzer in 1999 has become the model for other
programs at universities throughout the United States.

Pitzer is also one of fifteen California International Studies Project (CISP) locations, funded by the State of California to support the development of public school teachers through collaboration with faculty in social sciences and world history. There are thirty-six current and former Peace Corps volunteers who are alumni of Pitzer College. Pitzer College was invited to become one of ten colleges forming the founding core of the national Project Pericles, which encourages liberal arts colleges to turn rhetoric into action by training students to be responsible citizens.

Leadership in Environmental Education Partnership (LEEP) trains Pitzer students in principles of environmental education so they can serve as instructors to children from elementary schools. At left, an elementary school student participates in an activity at the Bernard Field Station.