Guide to Colleges Celebrates K’s Excellence

Posted on by Andy Brown
Fiske Guide to Colleges
Sourcebooks, the publisher of the “Fiske Guide to Colleges,” says “K’s academic terms may be fast-paced and the workload demanding, but students are given the flexibility to pursue their interests through individualized projects and off-campus exploration.”

Kalamazoo College’s excellence is again featured in the annual Fiske Guide to Colleges, a selective look at about 300 higher-education institutions in the United States, Canada and the U.K.

The guide’s readers discover institutional personalities based on a broad range of subjects including the student body, academics, social life, financial aid, campus setting, housing, food and extracurricular activities. The book also includes a quiz to help students understand what they’re looking for in a college, lists of strong programs and popular majors at each institution, indexes that break down schools by state and price, and ratings regarding academics and quality of life.

In the 2022 version, available now, the publisher Sourcebooks says K students “pursue a liberal arts curriculum that includes language proficiency, a first-year writing seminar, sophomore and senior seminars, as well as a senior individualized project—directed research, a creative piece, or a traditional thesis—basically anything that caps off each student’s education in some meaningful way.”

In addition to senior integrated projects promoting independent scholarship opportunities, the guide praises other tenets of the K-Plan, the College’s four-part, integrated approach to education, including:

  • Rigorous academics. The flexibility and rigor of K’s curriculum provides students with a customized academic experience.
  • Experiential education. Students connect classroom learning with real-world experience by completing career development internships or externships, participating in civic engagement and service-learning projects, and getting involved in social justice leadership work.
  • International and intercultural experience. Students choose from 56 study abroad programs in 29 countries across six continents. A biology major interviewed by the publisher remarks on how easy it is for students to take advantage of the opportunity, noting, “Kalamazoo College does study abroad so well that it seems ridiculous not to take advantage of this opportunity. They make it financially accessible and ensure that you won’t fall behind by going abroad.”

“K’s academic terms may be fast-paced and the workload demanding, but students are given the flexibility to pursue their interests through individualized projects and off-campus exploration,” the Guide to Colleges says. “The result, says a senior, is a student body defined by open-minded, global citizens.”