Bard College at Simon’s Rock

If you’re on the verge of 11th or 12th grade and certain you don’t want more of the same,Bard College at Simon’s Rock can show you what education is like when everyone shares your love of learning. We’re the only residential college experience designed for thoughtful, exceptionally motivated students who are ready to start college early.

All of our 400 students come to us after 10th or 11th grade in high school. We give them a broad-minded, paradigm-shifting education; faculty trained in the country’s best universities; inspired and  inspiring classes; first-class facilities for the sciences, the arts, and athletics; and an astonishing range of opportunities for conducting specialized research and gaining hands-on experience. We offer over 40 concentrations, many of them interdisciplinary; our academic program leads to an AA or a BA.

Simon’s Rock was founded by Elizabeth Blodgett Hall in 1966. In 1979 we became part of Bard College (established in 1860), one of the country’s outstanding (and most innovative) liberal arts colleges, located 50 miles away, in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.

Bard College at Simon’s Rock is the only four year college in the United States specifically designed to allow bright, highly motivated adolescents to fully realize their intellectual and creative potential by beginning college immediately after the tenth or eleventh grade.

Offering students both significant autonomy and appropriate support, Simon’s Rock fosters a diverse community of intellectual and chronological peers. Under the guidance of talented and dedicated faculty, students learn to formulate and defend their own ideas; to engage with the ideas of others; and to become innovative thinkers who contribute with purpose to the world around them.