Pomona College (pəˈmoʊnə ) is a private liberal arts college in Claremont, California. It was established in 1887 by a group of Congregationalists who wanted to recreate a "college of the New England type" in Southern California. In 1925, it became the founding member of the Claremont Colleges consortium of adjacent, affiliated institutions.
Pomona is a four-year undergraduate institution that approximately students. It offers 48 majors in liberal arts disciplines and roughly 650 courses, as well as access to more than 2,000 additional courses at the other Claremont Colleges. Its campus is in a residential community east of downtown Los Angeles, near the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains.
Pomona has the lowest acceptance rate of any U.S. liberal arts college and is considered the most prestigious liberal arts college in the American West and one of the most prestigious in the country. It has a $ endowment , making it the one of the 10 wealthiest schools in the U.S. on a per student basis. Nearly all students live on campus, and the student body is noted for its racial, geographic, and socioeconomic diversity. The college's athletics teams, the Sagehens, compete jointly with Pitzer College in the SCIAC, a Division III conference.
Prominent alumni of Pomona include Oscar, Emmy, Grammy, and Tony award winners; U.S. Senators, ambassadors, and other federal officials; Pulitzer Prize recipients; billionaire executives; a Nobel Prize laureate; National Academies members; and Olympic athletes. The college is a top producer of Fulbright scholars and recipients of other fellowships.
Pomona College was established as a coeducational and nonsectarian Christian institution on October 14, 1887, amidst a real estate boom and anticipated population influx precipitated by the arrival of a transcontinental railroad to Southern California. Its founders, a regional group of Congregationalists, sought to create a "college of the New England type", emulating the institutions where many of them had been educated.