Harvey Mudd College (HMC) is a private residential liberal arts college of science, engineering, and mathematics, founded in 1955 and located in Claremont, California, United States. It is one of the institutions of the contiguous Claremont Colleges, which share adjoining campus grounds. The college's mission is: "Harvey Mudd College seeks to educate engineers, scientists, and mathematicians well versed in all of these areas and in the humanities and the social sciences so that they may assume leadership in their fields with a clear understanding of the impact of their work on society."
For the class of 2019, the middle 50% of SAT scores for enrolled freshmen
were 730–800 (out of 800) in mathematics, 670–760 in critical reading, and
680–760 in writing. A third of the student body are National Merit Scholars, and at one
point, about 40 percent of graduates were going on to earn a Ph.D. — the highest rate of
any college or university in the nation.
Harvey Mudd College, along with Wake Forest University, long held out as
the last four-year colleges or universities in the U.S. to accept only SAT and not ACT test scores in their admissions process. In August 2007, however, at the
beginning of the application process for the class of 2012, HMC began accepting
ACT results, a year after Wake Forest abandoned its
former SAT-only policy.
Harvey Mudd today still maintains the highest rate of science and engineering
Ph.D. production among all undergraduate colleges and second highest (Caltech
ranks first and MIT third) compared to all universities and colleges, according
to a 2008 report by the National Science Foundation.
Money Magazine ranked Harvey Mudd 7th in the country out of the nearly 1500
schools it evaluated for its 2014 Best Colleges ranking. The Daily Beast ranked
Harvey Mudd 78th in the country out of the nearly 2000 schools it evaluated for
its 2013 Best Colleges ranking. According to U.S. News & World Report's
2015 America's Best Colleges rankings, Harvey Mudd College is tied for the 15th
best liberal arts college in the United States and is tied for the best
undergraduate engineering school in the US whose highest degree is a
Master's. Forbes in 2014 rated Harvey Mudd College #52 of its
America's Best Colleges ranking, which includes military academies, national
universities, and liberal arts colleges. In 2006, Harvey Mudd was also named one of
the "new Ivy leagues" by Kaplan and Newsweek.
Harvey Mudd College is one of the few colleges in the US with very low grade inflation. As of
2010, only seven students in the history of the college have achieved a perfect
4.0 GPA.
In 1997, Harvey Mudd College became the sole American undergraduate-only
institution ever to win 1st place in the ACM International
Collegiate Programming Contest. As of 2015, no American school has won the
world competition since.
According to PayScale, graduates
of Harvey Mudd College earn the highest salaries among graduates of any college
in the United States. The Harvey Mudd College mathematics
department is highly ranked and was the 2006 recipient of the American Mathematical Society
award for an Exemplary Program or Achievement in a Mathematics Department. Two of the
department's alumni, Joshua Greene and Aaron Archer, were winners and
honorable mention for the Morgan Prize in 2002 and 1998 respectively. The Morgan Prize is an annual
award given to an undergraduate student in the US, Canada, or Mexico who
demonstrates superior mathematics research.