Wikipedia:Today's featured article/May 11, 2011

Shimer College is a small, private, undergraduate liberal arts college in Chicago. Founded by Frances Wood Shimer in 1853 in Mt. Carroll, Illinois, it was a women's school for most of its first century. It joined with the University of Chicago in 1896, and became one of the first junior colleges in the country in 1907. In 1950, it became a co-educational four-year college, took the name Shimer College, and adopted the university's curriculum of the Hutchins Plan of Great Books and Socratic seminars. In 1958, Shimer separated from the university and enjoyed national recognition and strong growth in the 1960s but was forced by financial problems to abandon its campus in 1978. It then moved to Waukegan, IL, remaining there until 2006, when it moved to the National Register of Historic Places-listed campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology in the Bronzeville neighborhood in the Douglas community area of Chicago. Classes are exclusively small seminars in which students discuss original source material rather than textbooks. The Early Entrant Program, in place since 1950, allows students who have not yet completed high school to start college early. Shimer has the third highest rate of graduates who complete doctorate degrees of any liberal arts college in the country. (more...)

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