The Little College That Put Engineering Inside the Liberal Arts

In the winter of 1845, doing something no other American liberal arts college would touch, Union College began teaching engineering. At the time this was close to heresy. Engineering was workshop labor, the province of trade schools and canal companies, and the classical college - Latin, Greek, moral philosophy - kept it at arm's length. Union, a fifty-year-old school on a bluff above the Mohawk River in Schenectady, New York, simply put the two under one roof. It has kept them there ever since.

That decision is the whole story in miniature. Union is not the biggest college, the richest, or the loudest. It enrolls roughly 2,000 undergraduates and employs about 940 people. What it has instead is a stubborn, 230-year-old idea: that a single small campus can hold both the humanist and the engineer, and that students are better for the collision. The name says it plainly. When the college was chartered in 1795 - the first ever chartered by the New York State Board of Regents - "Union" signaled that it belonged to no single church and no single faction. Two centuries later the word does double duty. It is also where the liberal arts and engineering share a hallway.

01 / WHAT IT ACTUALLY ISA college built on a contradiction

Union College is a private, nonprofit, residential liberal arts college. Its catalog runs the length you would expect - humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, more than 58 majors and minors, and the option to design an interdisciplinary major of your own. What breaks the mold is the engineering: full, ABET-accredited degrees in bioengineering and in civil, computer, electrical, environmental, and mechanical engineering. Most schools with a program like that are polytechnics. Most liberal arts colleges quietly send their would-be engineers to a partner university for the last two years. Union does neither. A student can major in mechanical engineering and take the same core as a classics major, in the same small rooms, taught by the same professors.

Those rooms are small on purpose. Union reports that in a recent year only a couple dozen of more than 400 classes had more than 29 students, that every undergraduate course is taught by a professor rather than a teaching assistant, and that roughly 97% of its faculty hold the top degree in their field. This is the trade a small college offers: less scale, more contact.

02 / THE CALENDARTen weeks at a time

Union runs on a trimester - three ten-week terms it calls Fall, Winter, and Spring. It is a genuinely different rhythm from the two-semester default, and it is not a gimmick. Ten-week terms mean a student takes fewer courses at once and goes deeper into each. They also make the college's international programs click into place: a full term abroad fits neatly into a schedule already cut into thirds, which is part of why "terms abroad" shows up in Union's own description of itself. The calendar is the quiet infrastructure behind a lot of what makes Union feel unlike its peers.

03 / WHO IT SERVESTwo thousand at a time

Union's "customers," in the language of this profile, are undergraduates and the families who send them - about 2,065 enrolled in the fall of 2024 - plus generations of alumni who now number in the tens of thousands. The college accepts a little under half of applicants. It sits in the cluster of small northeastern schools sometimes called the "Little Ivies," alongside Williams, Amherst, Middlebury, Hamilton, and Colgate. The problem those students are hiring Union to solve is a specific one: they want the intimacy and breadth of a liberal arts college without giving up a rigorous, accredited path into engineering or the sciences. That combination is rare enough that it is fair to call it Union's market position.

04 / HOW IT'S DIFFERENTThe only Little Ivy with an engineering degree

Plenty of colleges will tell you they are interdisciplinary. Union has the receipts. It was, in 1845, the first American liberal arts college to offer engineering, and it never spun the program off into a separate technical institute. Among the elite small colleges it competes with for students, it is essentially the only one that awards full engineering degrees on its own campus. For a certain kind of applicant - the one who likes poetry and circuit design equally and refuses to choose - that is not a marketing line. It is the reason to enroll.

The difference runs into the architecture, too. In 1813 the French architect Joseph Jacques Ramee drew Union's campus as a single unified plan, one of the first comprehensively designed campuses in the country. The 16-sided Nott Memorial that anchors it is a National Historic Landmark. Union also carries an odder distinction: it is called the "Mother of Fraternities" because three of the oldest fraternities in America were founded on its grounds.

05 / THE PEOPLE IT MADEA president, a Nobel laureate, a Secretary of State

For a college its size, Union's alumni roster is lopsided. Chester A. Arthur, the 21st President of the United States, entered Union in 1845, joined a debating society, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. William H. Seward, Lincoln's Secretary of State, was a graduate. So was Baruch S. Blumberg, who later won a Nobel Prize in medicine. The pattern - small classes, close faculty contact, a wide field of study - has a way of producing graduates who end up in charge of things.

The most improbable figure in Union's story never left it. Eliphalet Nott became president in 1804 and served for 62 years - a tenure so long it is still the record for any American college president. Nott was a preacher, an educator, and, characteristically, an inventor who held patents including one for a stove. He reshaped the curriculum, championed the campus plan, and ran the place through eras that most institutions experience as a series of different leaders. It is hard to think of a better emblem for a college whose defining trait is that it does not let go of a good idea.

06 / THE BUSINESS OF ITHow a 230-year-old nonprofit keeps the lights on

Union is a nonprofit, which shapes everything about its finances. Revenue - on the order of $139 million a year - comes from tuition and fees, endowment income, gifts and alumni giving, sponsored research, and auxiliary operations like housing and dining. There are no shareholders; surplus is plowed back into faculty, financial aid, buildings, and programs. Fundraising matters as much as any single line item, and Union has leaned into it: its "Powering Union" campaign passed the $300 million mark a year ahead of schedule, during what the college describes as the two best fundraising years in its history.

07 / WHERE IT'S HEADEDA new president, an old goal

Leadership changed hands in 2025. David R. Harris, who led Union from 2018 and launched a strategic plan built explicitly around blending the liberal arts and engineering, stepped down on June 30. Elizabeth Kiss took office as the college's 20th president the next day. Harris's tenure left a marker on the campus - Harris House was dedicated in May 2025 - and it left Kiss a clear, difficult mandate: keep fusing the two halves of Union that most schools keep apart. It is the oldest ambition on campus and, judging by 180 years of trying, the one Union is least likely to abandon.

08 / THE BOTTOM LINESmall on purpose

The easy read of Union is "a good small college in upstate New York." The truer one is that Union made a bet very early - that breadth and depth do not have to live in different buildings - and then held that position for longer than almost any of its peers have existed. In an era when higher education keeps pulling apart into ever-narrower specialties, a school whose entire identity is the refusal to specialize is, quietly, a contrarian one. You can spend four years there learning to build a bridge and read a poem in the same week. That is more or less the point.

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