Mount Holyoke College holds distinction as the nation's oldest continuing institution of higher education for women and ranks as one of the nation's finest liberal arts colleges.

Mary Lyon founded the college in 1837, a time when the overwhelming majority of women didn't even consider attending college. Today, Mount Holyoke enrolls about 2,000 students. They hail from every state in the union and more than 60 countries around the world.

Mount Holyoke's distinguished faculty members have captured some of the nation's most prestigious awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellowships, and the National Science Foundation's Presidential Young Investigators Award.

Facilities on the 800-acre campus Mount Holyoke campus include a 662,371-volume main library with dedicated sub-libraries for science, art, and music, and computerized access to five million more volumes through the Five College Consortium. Mount Holyoke is also home to a world-class equestrian center, an award-winning 18-hole championship golf course, and one of the leading collegiate art museums in America.

Mount Holyoke's distinguished alumnae include the poets Emily Dickinson (1849) and Virginia Hamilton Adair (1933); Frances Perkins (1902), the first woman to serve in a presidential cabinet; Ella Grasso (1940), former governor of Connecticut; Virginia Apgar (1929), the physician who developed a score for evaluating newborns; and Dulcy Singer (1955), the former executive producer of Sesame Street.

Other former students include Julia Phillips (1965), the first woman producer to win an Oscar; Wendy Wasserstein (1971), a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright; Pamela Maffei McCarthy (1974), senior vice president and deputy editor of The New Yorker; and Suzan Lori Parks (1985), an Obie award-winning playwright. Four alumnae and Mount Holyoke's founder, Mary Lyon, have been honored on U.S. postage stamps.