TRI-COLLEGE CONSORTIUM: THE CONSORTIUM OF QUAKER COLLEGES AT THE HEART OF THE QUAKER CONSORTIUM

The Tri-College Consortium (“Tri-Co”) is a collaborative association between three top-ranked private liberal arts colleges located in the Main Line region, to the west of the city of Philadelphia. The three member institutions have a long history of cooperation, common initiatives, and pooled resources. Students at each school are entitled to cross-register for courses at one of the other member schools, with some academic programmes being delivered jointly. The Tri-Co colleges also operate a combined library system, an integrated transport system linking their campuses and several other jointly managed services and facilities.

ABOUT

The three colleges that comprise the Tri-College Consortium are Bryn Mawr College, Haverford College, and Swarthmore College. As well as their geographic proximity to one another, they share a similar heritage and ethos having been founded by the Quaker community that historically dominated Philadelphia and its western suburbs and neighbouring townships. As three of the most prestigious and selective liberal arts colleges in the United States, the three schools have a friendly rivalry and camaraderie, viewing one another as their closest peers. (Please note that this consortium has no connection or affiliation with another association of prestigious colleges of the same name – the Tri-College Consortium in Lynchburg, Virginia whose members include Randolph College, Sweet Briar College and the University of Lynchburg)

The three colleges were each founded in the 19^th Century, Haverford College in 1833, Swarthmore College in 1864, and Bryn Mawr College in 1885. Bryn Mawr and Haverford owe their foundation to Orthodox Quakers who moved to the region from Wales, whilst Swarthmore owes its establishment to Hicksite Quakers who trace their lineage back to England. The Orthodox Quakers had established themselves in positions of high influence in Philadelphian society and favoured the establishment of a formal church which would become a “High Church” branch of mainstream Protestantism. The Hicksite community split from orthodoxy within the wider Quaker movement, favouring, instead, the traditional “Low Church” Quaker approach. Nonetheless, the three institutions embodied the Quaker educational ethos that promotes inquiry-based learning, moral and character development and progressive, inclusive ideas.

All three of these schools have become renowned and regularly feature amongst the highest ranked schools in North America. They represent the pinnacle of Quaker aligned tertiary education and are amongst the oldest degree-awarding institutions with a Quaker foundation. The schools were founded in response to the rising need for capable, qualified young people to support the growth of cities like Philadelphia and the increasing dominance of Quaker companies and enterprises on American industry. Many older institutions had been founded as theological seminaries for the expressed purpose of training clergy and/or missionaries to meet the needs of their respective founding churches. This had not been a need within Quaker communities with adherents eschewing an ordained ministry. However, many of these older schools began to move away from their religious role and started offering degrees and qualifications in varied fields of study, inspired by the European university model. The devout, however, still preferred to undertake a programme of study at an institution that aligned with their faith (or, more likely, was an acceptable choice by their families or communities). Young Quakers did not have such an option, and many had pursued education at establishments like the University of Pennsylvania (Penn), which despite its nickname – “The Quakers”, did not have a Quaker foundation but owes its origin instead to Methodists and Evangelical Anglicans.

So it was that Haverford College was founded in 1833, welcoming young men of a Quaker background to undertake a course of study on a par with that offered by the established ancient universities and colleges dotted about the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic (particularly those that would later form the Ivy League, the College of William & Mary, Dickinson College, Hampden-Sydney College, Moravian University, Rutgers University, Union College and Washington and Lee University). Haverford would welcome non-Quaker students too from 1849.

Swarthmore was founded 31 years after Haverford and some 10 miles to the south. Swarthmore was, from the outset, a co-educational institution but quickly established itself as one of the nation’s great colleges with a particularly strong reputation for its football programme which saw Swatties’ teams regularly triumphing against the established programmes at their peers. Swarthmore became fierce athletic rivals with the male-only Haverford and the two share one of the oldest rivalries in the history of the sport.

Bryn Mawr College was founded at the inception of members of Haverford’s board in 1885 to provide a similar quality instruction to young Quaker women. The college is less than two miles from Haverford’s campus and, from the outset, served as a sister college to it. Even today, women from Bryn Mawr may participate in Haverford women’s sports teams (with Haverford having been co-educational since 1980).

The Tri-Co colleges developed a reputation for excellence from the outset, eclipsing many older, nationally renowned colleges with the quality and calibre of their faculty and graduates. Having become the favoured destinations for the offspring of Philadelphia’s wealthy elite, they became associated with privilege and exclusivity, despite their progressive Quaker ethos. This trend would continue into the 20^th Century, perhaps reaching its peak in the interwar and post-war periods where even celebrated social commentator E. Digby Baltzell, himself a descendant of a great Philadelphian dynasty, had observed that by 1940 Haverford College and Swarthmore College were considered to be amongst the top five most prestigious tertiary institutions in all of America, eclipsing the reputation of larger research universities and many Ivy League colleges (see ‘The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy & Caste in America‘. Both colleges enjoyed a close rivalry with other lauded institutions, particularly the University of Pennsylvania, Dickinson College, the Pennsylvania Military Academy (now Widener University), Lehigh University, Lafayette College and Johns Hopkins University.

Bryn Mawr College’s rise was equally prolific, with the college being considered not only a sister school to Haverford but also to nearby universities like the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University. The school was invited to join a conference of like-minded, women’s colleges in 1926, called the Seven College Conference. This association, built out of the established Four College Conference would become better known as the Seven Sisters, a loose consortium of equally prestigious women’s colleges which also included Barnard College, Mount Holyoke College, Radcliffe College, Smith College, Wellesley College, and Vassar College. These were widely viewed as the female equivalent of the Ivy League, the top tier of tertiary institutions in the country.

The three are still regarded as amongst the most prestigious in the country, operating highly selective admissions policies and attracting only the most academically gifted from across the world. In recent years, each of the schools has made substantial efforts to diversify their faculty, student body and academic offer to ensure that they better represent modern America and the communities that they serve. The old money, White Anglo-Saxon Protestant reputation that was once attached to these colleges is no longer a fair representation of what they stand for nor their respective communities. In fact, these three colleges, particularly are often celebrated as amongst the most diverse and progressive colleges in North America. They are all recognised as being amongst the “Little Ivies” or “Hidden Ivies”, a cadre of elite universities and liberal arts colleges that are viewed as the peer schools of and alternatives to the more famous research universities of the Ivy League and which compete for the same applicants.

The three colleges have cooperated with one another on a host of matters for much of their history with the earliest suggestions of a consortium approach having been explored in the 1940s, when the impact of the great war effort forced them to find innovative ways to sustain themselves, realising synergies through pooling their faculty and, briefly, combining the management of their libraries. These efforts to establish a common, combined library system formed the initial movement towards a full consortium, which was successfully instituted in the 1980s with the TriCollege Libraries scheme (known as “Tripod”) still operating today to that effect. The common libraries initiative, which went live in 1991, operates a unified catalogue with a single digital interface. Students may access and request all material held by the three libraries (with twice-daily delivery of physical orders) and have access to all published research from across the three colleges. The combined library also facilitates and supports collaborative research efforts between academics at the three colleges.

As neighbouring institutions with a common ancestry and foundation, Bryn Mawr and Haverford formed the Bi-College Consortium (“Bi-Co”) in the 1980s and enjoy a deeper relationship and much greater integration of their academic programmes and administrative functions. However, the Tri-College Consortium has evolved over the years, building upon the Bi-Co agenda and including Swarthmore in a number of its institutions.

The Tri-College Consortium extends beyond its primary roles having a combined library and providing for a cross-registration scheme allowing pupils at one college to register for and attend classes at another. The Tri-Co also allows for pupils to register for and attend social events at one another’s campuses, visit common dining facilities and residential facilities, participate in extra-curricular and co-curricular clubs and societies, or take part in performing arts and visual arts programmes not on offer on their own respective campus. A number of student interest and student representative groups also exist across the three campuses. The Tri-Co arrangement is facilitated by the common transport circuit served by the famous “Blue Bus” which links the three campuses. In recent years, the Tri-Co has built upon the joint-educational programmes common to the Bi-Co, with schemes like the Luce Initiative on Asian Studies and the Environment (LIAISE), the Asian American Studies Program and the Tri-Co Philly Programme which offer a single course structure and consolidated faculty that operate across the three colleges. The Philly Program is a non-residential course operating from the Friends Center in Philadelphia. Several student-led societies and programmes also operate on a tri-college basis, such as the Tri-Co Law Review, a student-managed legal circular and research group.

The Tri-College Consortium forms the nucleus of the Quaker Consortium (“Quaky”), a less formal arrangement which allows for limited cross-registration between the Tri-Co Colleges and the illustrious University of Pennsylvania of the Ivy League.

The three Tri-College Consortium members are also part of The Alliance to Advance Liberal Arts Colleges (AALAC), the Annapolis Group of Liberal Arts Colleges, the Consortium of Liberal Arts Colleges (CLAC), the Consortium on Financing Higher Education (COFHE), the Liberal Arts Collaborative for Digital Innovation (LACOL), the Oberlin Group of College Libraries and the Pennsylvania Consortium for the Liberal Arts (PCLA). Bryn Mawr and Haverford are also members of the Selective Liberal Arts Consortium (SLAC) and Haverford and Swarthmore are members of the Questbridge funding consortium and the 568 Presidents Group. These associations represent the pinnacle of the private liberal arts sector in the United States and its membership is comprised of only the very best, peer-approved, selective liberal arts colleges. All three colleges are fully accredited members of the Middle States Commission on Higher Education (MSCHE), the senior governing and accreditation body for tertiary education in the Mid-Atlantic states. Bryn Mawr, Haverford and Swarthmore colleges continue their sporting rivalries under the auspices of the NCAA affiliated Division III Centennial Conference – their primary athletic conference. The three colleges are part of the wider “Ivy Plus” community and participate in various Ivy Plus initiatives under the Ivy Plus consortium banner, including the Ivy Plus Sustainability Consortium (IPSC) and the Ivy Plus Writing Consortium (IPWC).

If you would like to find out more about the Tri-College Consortium then please get in touch with your preferred member institution as listed below.

If you attended one of the Tri-Co member schools, Bryn Mawr, Haverford or Swarthmore, we would be very keen to hear about your time there and any insights as to how the Tri-College Consortium arrangement impacted on your college experience. These personal details and stories can make a huge difference to prospective applicants looking to make one of these colleges their future home.