Wofford College

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Wofford College was founded in 1854 with a bequest of $100,000 from the Rev. Benjamin Wofford. Still located on its original campus in Spartanburg, South Carolina, Wofford College has become nationally known for the strength of its academic programs, outstanding faculty, and commitment to providing its students a holistic liberal arts education.
Imagine a college where each student's academic, residential, and co-curricular experience is merged seamlessly—a place of full-time learning from the classroom to the playing field to the residence hall. A dynamic environment where students receive a liberal arts education that emphasizes leadership, engagement, and global context, giving them the skills and experience to address complex challenges around such themes as poverty and development, environment and sustainability, technology and society, and identity and culture. This is the Wofford learning experience we are imagining. Moreover, we believe this experience can become a leading educational model for developing well-rounded, exceptional citizens of the 21st century.
Extraordinary citizens and lifelong learners emerge organically—and a high college provides the right conditions for that organic process to occur. Students must have room to create and explore the creative physical, intellectual and virtual spaces. They must have opportunities to engage and debate with one another, faculty, staff, administrators, alumni, and community members. These unstructured face-to-face interactions often lead to connections across disciplines and spaces, including regional and global communities that produce new understanding, new knowledge, and possibilities.
At Wofford, we celebrate the diversity of all kinds. We seek to recruit talented, geographically diverse students in gender, race, ethnicity, religion, and more and are committed to providing access to the Wofford educational experience.
Wofford offers diversity awareness and enhancement programming to support underrepresented students on campus. These programs open a dialogue about different cultures, ideas, and people. In addition to programs that currently exist, Wofford is investigating ways to support, increase, and enhance a more diverse and inclusive campus community.
Prepare students to be exemplary leaders and citizens by integrating academic and co-curricular learning for first-year students encouraging sophomores to live and engage collaboratively, promoting meaningful social engagement supporting civic learning, civic engagement, and collaborative partnerships and doing more to integrate personal and professional development into a Wofford education.
While faculty and staff diversity at Wofford certainly have increased over the years, we need to make a more significant commitment to ensure that our community reflects a plurality of people, viewpoints, and ideas that is so important in a 21st-century liberal arts education. Our students will benefit significantly from a learning-living environment that brings them closer contact with faculty and staff of different cultures, ethnicities, races, religions, genders, ages, national origins, socioeconomic backgrounds, and physical abilities. If we agree that education includes encounters with people and experiences that push us beyond our comfort and knowledge, we must commit to increasing diversity. At the same time, we must find effective ways to bring this diverse and engaged community closer together. We are expanding the responsibilities and resources of an office of diversity initiatives to include campus-wide activities, which will provide a higher level of support for faculty and staff.
Out of 1,692 students, 1,571 were awarded over $55 million in 2016-2017. The numbers speak for themselves. Over 90% of Wofford students receive financial aid. All new first-year students are considered for Wofford Merit Scholarships using the information in the student's admission file. Contact the Financial Aid Office at Wofford College for information and assistance regarding scholarships, grants, loans, and on-campus employment.
The Richardson Family Scholarship is the highest honor awarded to an entering first-year student at Wofford. This scholarship is awarded through the Wofford Scholars Program and includes an additional on-campus interview with college representatives and the Richardson family.
Industry publications consistently recognize Wofford as a leading liberal arts institution based on its academic programs and faculty's strength. Offering 67 majors, minors, and programs in a vast array of subjects, Wofford lets students create an educational path that best suits their interests, passions, and life goals.
Wofford's campus is bustling with excitement and events. There are more than 80 clubs and organizations to become a part of and hundreds of more activities on campus. Whether you are grabbing coffee with friends in Acorn Café, cheering on the Terriers at a ballgame, or enjoying an alfresco lunch in Players Corner, you are just having a typical day at Wofford.
No matter if you prefer to listen to live music, shag and eat oysters, watch a hit film on the lawn or attend a fraternity event, Wofford has a vibrant social scene. From Greek Life to Wofford Live programming to W.A.C. sponsored events, there is something for everyone here at Wofford.
On July 4, 1851, the future Methodist Bishop William Wightman came to a beautiful sight on a high ridge overlooking the tiny courthouse village of Spartanburg, S.C. As more than 4,000 people looked on, he made the keynote address while local Masons laid the cornerstone for Wofford College. A distinguished professor and journalist as well as a clergyman, Wightman stressed that the new institution would pattern itself after neither the South's then-elitist public universities nor the narrowly sectarian colleges sponsored by some denominations. Instead, he argued, "It is impossible to conceive of greater benefits — to the individual or society — than those embraced in the gift of a liberal education, combining moral principle ... with the enlightened and cultivated understanding which is the product of thorough scholarship."

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