Elizabethtown College

[EduCativ]

Our commitment is to Educate for Service. We believe that learning is most noble when used to benefit others, regardless of the chosen career path. We prepare our students to lead rich lives of purpose and meaning while advancing independent thought, personal integrity, and social responsibility. These are the foundations for a life of learning. We foster the values of peace, non-violence, human dignity, and social justice.
With 1,671 undergraduates from 28 states and 23 foreign countries, Elizabethtown College is an independent, residential, coeducational college in historic Lancaster County, in south-central Pennsylvania. The College, established by the Church of the Brethren in 1899, maintains 18 academic departments, offering 45 majors and 108 minors and concentrations. The core curriculum emphasizes the arts, humanities, and sciences. Elizabethtown College provides a transformative educational experience that cultivates personal strengths and develops a passion for lifelong learning and purposeful work.
The impact of an Elizabethtown College education is long-lasting and far-reaching because it is profoundly transformative. Students acquire new habits of mind and heart—some in the undergraduate experience, others as students grow beyond College.
Our educational experience blends a high standard of scholarship with four signature attributes, which include commitments to educate our students in a relationship-centered learning community, to foster in our students international and cross-cultural perspectives, to complement classroom instruction with experiential learning opportunities, and to prepare our students for purposeful lives and meaningful work.
Our educational programs engage students in ways that capture their most profound attention, confront them with compelling learning experiences, and call out from the responses that reach beyond what even they thought possible. In this learning community, our faculty members and other employees demonstrate their passion for their subjects and continued learning so that our students see how effective deep engagement is. Students receive personal attention, as all employees commit to expressing sincere and genuine interest in our students' educational success. Our College's classes deliberately are kept small to support our students' individual needs and challenge them to grow.
Elizabethtown offers a globalized curriculum and co-curriculum. Studies and development programs help students understand and effectively engage with other cultures and the globalization of life and work. Our staff includes faculty members and other employees who are citizens of countries worldwide, who speak many languages, and who have had numerous study and residential experiences on other continents. Students study alongside students from other cultures. Additionally, they encounter our international world when they visit, study in, or live in cities as diverse as Harrisburg, Philadelphia, London, Beijing, and Quito.
Elizabethtown seeks to broaden the contexts for student learning by fostering educational experiences through which students learn by doing. Through this experiential learning, students develop the aptitude to link theory and experience, and they are better prepared to continue learning throughout their lifetime. These opportunities are available through internships and externships, field placement assignments, independent and collaborative research projects, service-learning and civic engagement, leadership development, and campus enjoyment.
In both the curriculum and co-curriculum, the College's educational program fosters an understanding of education for a life of purpose based on a holistic model of student development that integrates career development reflection on vocation, meaning and life and a commitment to civic engagement. As a result, graduates of Elizabethtown are prepared to make the world a better place. They do so, in part, by living in ways that reflect their commitments, respond to the needs of others, and value personal and ethical integrity.
Elizabethtown College is committed to valuing and fostering the diversity reflected in our life together and in the world beyond our campus. We strive to ensure that the community members—students, faculty, staff, and administrators—are diverse in race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, religion, ability, gender, gender identity and expression, age, and national origin. We also seek to provide our community members, especially our students, with educational opportunities, programs, and services that are multicultural in content and expressive of a diverse life of experiences and worldviews that underrepresented groups bring to the learning environment.
All significant decisions at E-town are made with sustainability in mind. Elements of our efforts can be found throughout all facets of our campus community. As our college community grows and advances every year, our commitment to sustainability continues to gain momentum. We have placed a significant focus on monitoring our current operations' efficiency to target our weaknesses and make improvements. We have created a Green Fund to help cover the costs of our sustainable projects. This self-awareness has allowed us to make substantial progress through various projects, including the construction of the most extensive solar array of any educational institution in Pennsylvania. Throughout all of our actions, education remains our top priority. We strive toward creating a sustainable campus to share with our faculty, staff, students, and community.

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