Clarkson University Admission
Clarkson University Undergraduate Program
Clarkson University Application

The Facts

Clarkson University is a small, private institution located in the town of Potsdam, New York, and is home to over 2,800 undergraduate students and approximately 450 graduate and part-time professional students. The university was founded in 1896 as a place for students to combine the liberal arts with preprofessional studies in order to be well-rounded as well as prepared for the working world. Clarkson University is actually divided up into several smaller graduate and undergraduate colleges including schools of engineering, business, science, the liberal arts, and health sciences. The schools offer broad majors in the areas of biological science, business (including an innovative program in electronic business), communication and the arts, computer and physical science, engineering and environmental design, health professions (which includes a unique specialty in industrial hygiene), and the social sciences. Clarkson offers its students a fairly wide variety of majors in both the liberal arts and preprofessional studies, and some of the most popular choices include engineering, business, the sciences, mechanical and computer engineering, and management.

Admission to Clarkson University is not terrifically competitive numerically, but the students who do apply tend to be quite accomplished and have been academically successful in the past. Last year, over 2,720 students applied for admission to the school, and approximately 2,170 of those students were accepted; of those, about 720 matriculated. The admitted students had an average combined SAT score ranging from 1190 to 1240, and an average comprehensive ACT score ranging from 28 to 33. Additionally, more than 82% of the admitted students were ranked in the top 25% of their high school graduating class with an average high school GPA of about 3.8.

Clarkson University has a fairly high student to faculty ratio of 19:1, and while some of the introductory classes are quite large, it is rare to find an upper-level class with more than 20 students. In general, professors get very high marks from students in terms of accessibility and willingness to help, but there are some teachers whom students feel care more about their careers than the well-being of their students.

The Social Scene

The town of Potsdam itself is hardly a town at all, and is located in a very rural area of upstate New York. However, the Canadian city of Ottawa is only about 75 miles away, and many students own cars, so they often make the trek across the border to have some fun on the weekends (plus, the legal drinking age is only 18 there, so many freshmen are known to take advantage of that perk...) There are quite a few national fraternities and sororities, and over 20% of the student body belongs to a Greek organization of some sort. The Greeks basically run the on-campus social scene, and their weekly parties are quite popular with the entire student population.

The dating scene may not be the most diverse, but there are plenty of attractive party animals who would love to take you up to Canada for a night on the town...

What’s Good

“Because the school is in such a rural area, you are really able to focus on your school work. There aren’t too many distractions to take you away from why you’re at school in the first place.”

“If you have a car, or even if you don’t getting up to Canada is really easy, and it’s a great weekend escape.”

“There are awesome study abroad programs in New Zealand, England, Italy, Sweden, Australia, France, and Canada.”

What’s Bad

“There is absolutely nothing to do around campus. If you want to have any morsel of fun, you have to cross the border!”

“You’d think with such a small school they could manage to keep the introductory class sizes nice and small, but guess again!”

“If you don’t have a car, you are totally stranded, and you start to feel extremely isolated.”

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