Reed College is a private liberal arts college in Portland, Oregon, United States. Founded in 1908, Reed is a residential college with a campus in the Eastmoreland neighborhood, Tudor-Gothic style architecture, and a forested canyon nature preserve at its center. Reed maintains a 9:1 student-to-faculty ratio and has approximately 1,300 undergraduate students.
Reed's curriculum includes programs in the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and arts. The college operates the Reed Research Reactor, a TRIGA research reactor used for undergraduate education and research, and in 2025 was classified as a Research College and University by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education.
Reed has developed a reputation for academic rigor and political progressivism, as well as for distinctive student traditions and an unconventional approach to undergraduate education. History
The Reed Institute (the legal name of the college) was founded in 1908 and held its first classes in 1911. Reed is named for Oregon pioneers Simeon Gannett Reed (1830–1895) and Amanda Reed (died 1904). Simeon was an entrepreneur involved in several enterprises, including trade on the Willamette and Columbia Rivers with his close friend and associate, former Portland Mayor William S. Ladd. Unitarian minister Thomas Lamb Eliot, who knew the Reeds from the church choir, is credited with convincing Reed of the need for the school. Reed's will provided for the gift, and Ladd's son, William Mead Ladd, donated 40 acres from the Ladd Estate Company to build the new college. Reed's first president (1910–1919) was William Trufant Foster, a former professor at Bates College and Bowdoin College.
Reed was founded explicitly as a reaction against the "prevailing model of East Coast, Ivy League education", its lack of varsity athletics, fraternities, and exclusive social clubs – as well as its coeducational, nonsectarian, and egalitarian status – intended to foster an intensely academic and intellectual college.
During the 1930s, President Dexter Keezer was concerned about the fraternization among male and female students and the consumption of alcohol by students. A large portion of the Student Council took the position that Oregon's liquor laws did not apply to Reed's campus. Policies restricting the ability of students from visiting the dormitories of the opposite sex were fiercely resisted.
After World War II the college saw its enrollment numbers dramatically increase as veterans began enrolling in the college.
The college has developed a reputation for the political progressivism of its student body.
Distinguishing features
Reed's curriculum emphasizes interdisciplinary study, independent inquiry, and close interaction between students and faculty. Students are required to complete a senior thesis, a yearlong research project conducted under faculty supervision.
Reed places an emphasis on undergraduate research. Students may conduct research with faculty members, undertake independent projects, and receive funding for research conducted on campus and elsewhere. In 2025, the Carnegie Classification designated Reed as a Research College and University, a category for institutions with substantial research activity that do not fall into the Carnegie R1 or R2 research-university classifications. Carnegie reported $6.75 million in research spending at Reed.
Reed's student-to-faculty ratio is 9:1, and its average class size is 14.5 students. The college enrolled 1,267 undergraduates and 11 graduate students in fall 2025.
Grades are de-emphasized at Reed and focus is placed on a narrative evaluation. Papers and exams are generally returned to students with lengthy comments but without grades affixed."There is no dean's list or honor roll, but students who maintain a GPA of 3.5 or above for an academic year receive academic commendations at the end of the spring semester which are noted on their transcripts. Reed is singled out as having little to no grade inflation over the years; only ten students graduated with a perfect 4.0 GPA in the period from 1983 to 2012. (Transcripts are accompanied by a card contextualizing Reed's grading approach so as not to penalize students' graduate school applications.) Although Reed does not award Latin honors to graduates, it confers several awards for academic achievement at commencement, including naming students to Phi Beta Kappa.
Reed has no fraternities or sororities and few NCAA sports teamsOne NCAA sports team at Reed has been the Reed College Ski Team, which as early as 1937, and as late as 1988, competed with the University of Oregon and other regional schools. See "Oregon Ski Team to meet Huskies", Eugene Register-Guard, December 14, 1937 although physical education classes (which range from kayaking to juggling to capoeira) are required for graduation. Reed also has several intercollegiate athletic clubs, notably the basketball, rugby, Ultimate Frisbee, and soccer teams.
Academics Reed categorizes its academic program into five Divisions and the Humanities program. Overall, Reed offers five Humanities courses, twenty-six department majors, twelve interdisciplinary majors, six dual-degree programs with other colleges and universities, and programs for pre-medical and pre-veterinary students. Its three most popular majors, based on 2023 graduates, were Psychology, Biology/Biological Sciences, and Computer and Information Sciences.
Divisions
Division of Arts: includes the Art (Art History and Studio Art), Dance, Music, and Theatre Departments; Division of History and Social Sciences: includes the Anthropology, Economics, History, Political Science, and Sociology Departments, as well as the International Affairs & Public Policy program; Division of Literature and Languages: includes the Chinese, English, French, German, Greek, Latin, and Ancient Mediterranean Studies (GLAM), Russian, and Spanish Departments, as well as the Creative Writing and Comparative Literature programs; Division of Mathematics and Natural Sciences: includes the Biology, Chemistry, Computer Science, Mathematics and Statistics, and Physics Departments, as well as the Biochemistry & Molecular Biology, Mathematics-Computer Science, and Neuroscience programs, and Division of Philosophy, Religion, Psychology, and Linguistics: includes the Linguistics, Philosophy, Psychology, and Religion Departments.
Humanities program Reed President Richard Scholz in 1922 called the educational program as a whole "an honest effort to disregard old historic rivalries and hostilities between the sciences and the arts, between professional and cultural subjects, and,... the formal chronological cleavage between the graduate and the undergraduate attitude of mind".Scholz, Richard F., "Remarks to the Association of American Colleges", 1922. The Humanities program, which came into being in 1943 (as the union of two year-long courses, one in "world" literature, the other in "world" history) is one manifestation of this effort. One change to the program was the addition of a course in Chinese Civilization in 1995. The faculty has also recently approved several significant changes to the introductory syllabus. These changes include expanding the parameters of the course to include more material regarding urban and cultural environments.
Reed's Humanities program includes the mandatory freshman course Introduction to Western Humanities covering ancient Greek and Roman literature, history, art, religion, and philosophy. Sophomores, juniors, and seniors may take Early Modern Europe covering Renaissance thought and literature; Modern Humanities covering the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and Modernism, and/or Foundations of Chinese Civilization. There is also a Humanities Senior Symposium.
Dual-degree programs Reed offers dual-degree programs in Computer Science (with University of Washington), Engineering (with Caltech, Columbia University, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute), Forestry or Environmental Management (with Duke University), and Fine Art (with the Pacific Northwest College of Art).
Rankings
In 1995, Reed College refused to participate in the U.S. News & World Report "best colleges" rankings, making it the first educational institution in the United States to refuse to participate in college rankings. According to Reed's Office of Admissions the school's refusal to participate is based in 1994 disclosures by The Wall Street Journal about institutions flagrantly manipulating data in order to move up in the rankings in U.S. News and other popular college guides. U.S. News maintains that their rankings are "a very legitimate tool for getting at a certain level of knowledge about colleges." In 2019, a team of statistics students recreated the formula used by U.S. News and were able to identify and quantify the penalty imposed on Reed. The students found the college to be ranked an estimated 52 places below an unbiased application of the U.S. News scoring rubric.
Money magazine ranked Reed 512th in the U.S. out of 623 schools evaluated for its 2022 "Best Colleges for Your Money" edition.
Reed is ranked as tied for the 63rd best liberal arts college by U.S. News & World Report in its 2025 rankings, and tied for 23rd in "Best Undergraduate Teaching", tied for 23rd in "Most Innovative Schools", and tied for 174th in "Top Performers on Social Mobility".
An episode of Canadian writer Malcolm Gladwell's podcast Revisionist History examines the flaws in the U.S. News system of university rankings. The episode features a project done by a Reed professor of statistics and her students to investigate the mechanics of the ranking algorithm, attempting to see if Reed's ranking had been purposefully devalued because the school refused to submit its information to U.S. News. Previous investigations by Reed students to re-create U.S. News's statistical ranking algorithm found that Reed's correct 2019 rank was #38 instead of its assigned rank of #90.
Admissions Undergraduate
The entering class in 2024 was drawn from 9,023 applicants, with 2321 accepted, and 303 students admitted. Median SAT scores were 690 math and 730 reading. Since 2018, to increase student enrollment from historically underrepresented minorities, Reed encourages application to the college's "Discover Reed Fly-In Program", an all-inclusive, all-expenses-paid, multi-day campus tour and open to all high school seniors who are US citizens or permanent residents, regardless of race or ethnicity.
Tuition and finances The total direct cost for the 2022–23 academic year, including tuition, fees and room-and-board, was $80,710. Indirect costs (books, supplies, transportation, personal expenses) could be another $3,950. For the 2022–23 academic year, the average financial aid package was $52,284. In 2022–23 over half of students received financial aid from the college. In 2004, 1.4% of Reed graduates defaulted on their student loans – below the national Cohort Default Rate average of 5.1%.
Reed's endowment as of June 30, 2023, was $764 million.As of June 30, 2023. In the economic downturn that began in late 2007, Reed's total endowment had declined from $455 million in June 2007 to $311 million in June 2009. By the end of 2013, however, the endowment surpassed the $500 million mark.
Academic honors