- Date:
- 1833 - present
- Areas Of Involvement:
- Coeducation
- Liberal arts
- Notable Alumni:
- Liz Phair
- Julie Taymor
- James McBride
- John Cazale
- Lena Dunham
Oberlin College
What degrees does Oberlin College offer?
Who founded Oberlin College and when?
What is significant about Oberlin College’s approach to education equality?
News •
Oberlin College, private coeducational institution of higher learning offering programs in liberal arts and music located in Oberlin, Ohio. Founded in 1833, the college offers bachelor of arts degrees in more than 40 disciplines. Its Conservatory of Music, established in 1865, is one of the oldest professional music schools in the United States and awards degrees at the bachelor and master’s levels. Oberlin College’s early motto was “Learning and Labor,” and it has admitted both men and women since its founding. The first Black students were admitted in 1835, and in February 1835 Oberlin became the first U.S. college to admit students without regard to race, when its trustees resolved, “That the education of the people of color is a matter of great interest and should be encouraged and sustained at the institution.” Total enrollment in fall 2024 was nearly 2,900.
Founding
Oberlin College was founded by Presbyterian minister John J. Shipherd and missionary Philo P. Stewart in 1833 as the Oberlin Collegiate Institute to educate ministers and schoolteachers to work among the settlers of the American West. The two named the school for the Alsatian pastor and educator Johann Friedrich Oberlin, and it was designated a college in 1850. Religious revivalist and Oberlin resident Charles Grandison Finney was an early supporter and would go on to serve as the college’s president from 1851 to 1866. The Conservatory of Music was established as a private school during Finney’s tenure and became a part of the college in 1867. The Finney Chapel, completed in 1908, is Oberlin’s largest performance space.
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Pioneer in education equality
Oberlin College’s first professional football coach (1892, 1894) was John Heisman. After leaving Oberlin, Heisman coached at several universities, including Georgia Institute of Technology, where his team had three consecutive seasons without a loss (1915–17). Heisman left coaching to become director of the Downtown Athletic Club of New York City. Beginning in 1935 the club annually awarded a trophy, known since 1936 as the Heisman Trophy, to the top college football player.
Oberlin College was coeducational from its beginning. Women were admitted to the baccalaureate program in 1837 (they previously received diplomas from the “Ladies Course”), and the graduating class of 1841 included three women, making Oberlin the first coeducational program in the United States to award bachelor’s degrees to women. Oberlin admitted Black students on an equal footing with whites beginning in 1835. George B. Vashon, the school’s first Black graduate, received a bachelor’s degree in 1844. Vashon would go on to teach at Howard University and become New York state’s first Black attorney. Mary Jane Patterson received a degree in 1862, becoming the first Black woman to receive a bachelor’s degree in the United States. Patterson became an educator and equal rights advocate. The college, along with the town, was a station on the Underground Railroad by which enslaved people escaped to freedom in Canada. Today this history is celebrated and commemorated at the Oberlin Underground Railroad Center and through an Underground Railroad sculpture on the Oberlin campus.
Environmental stewardship
In 2006 Oberlin signed the American Colleges & University President’s Climate Commitment (now called the Carbon Commitment), pledging to reach campus carbon neutrality by 2025. That same year the college’s board of trustees approved a policy requiring that all new construction policies meet LEED® standards, a certification program devised in 1994 by the U.S. Green Building Council (founded 1993) to encourage sustainable practices design and development by means of tools and criteria for performance measurement. The college announced in April 2025 that it had hit its carbon-neutrality goal by pivoting to clean energy sources, including converting its existing heating and cooling system from one that relied on fossil fuels to one based on geothermal energy.
Notable alumni
Notable alumni of the school include Nobel Prize-winning physicist Robert Andrews Millikan, suffragist Lucy Stone, educator Junius L. Meriam, chemist Charles Martin Hall (who bequeathed more than $5 million to Oberlin when he died in 1914), sculptor Edmonia Lewis, ethnologist Frances Densmore, activist Mary Church Terrell (the campus’s main library is named after Terrell), civil rights leader James Lawson, graphic novelist Alison Bechdel, writer and actor Lena Dunham, musician Liz Phair, and musician and National Book Award-winning author James McBride.