Bowdoin College

Bowdoin College is a private liberal arts college located in Brunswick, Maine. Founded in 1794, the college currently enrolls 1,839 students, and has been coeducational since 1971. Bowdoin offers 33 majors and four additional minors, and has a student–faculty ratio of 9:1.

Bowdoin was ranked as the fourth-best liberal arts college in the 2016 U.S. News & World Report rankings, and 21st on Forbes ranking in 2016.

The main Bowdoin campus is located near Casco Bay and the Androscoggin River, 12 miles north of Freeport, Maine, and 18 miles north of Portland, Maine. In addition to its Brunswick campus, Bowdoin also owns a 118-acre coastal studies center on Orr's Island and a 200-acre scientific field station on Kent Island in the Bay of Fundy.

Bowdoin College was chartered in 1794 by the Massachusetts State Legislature and was later redirected under the jurisdiction of the Maine Legislature. It was named for former Massachusetts governor James Bowdoin, whose son James Bowdoin III was an early benefactor. At the time of its founding, it was the easternmost college in the United States, as it was located in Maine.

Bowdoin began to develop in the 1820s, a decade in which Maine became an independent state as a result of the Missouri Compromise and the college graduated numerous literary philosophers such as writers Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, both of whom graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1825.

From its founding, Bowdoin was known to educate the sons of the politically elite and "catered very largely to the wealthy from the state of Maine." With the establishment of Bates College in nearby Lewiston, Bowdoin has historically competed with the school academically, and athletically, due to the natural rivalry that grew out of the stark difference between the two colleges, specifically regarding wealth, admissions, and academic platforms.  Many alumni of Bowdoin subsequently went on to develop Bates during the 1860's and alumni of Bates lectured at Bowdoin. During the first half of the 19th century, Bowdoin required of its students a certificate of "good moral character" as well as knowledge of Latin and Ancient Greek, geography, algebra and the major works of Cicero, Xenophon, Virgil and Homer.