Bennington College Top Questions

I have meet very cool and interesting people at Bennington. Everyone is very much their own person. There are lots of people who don't shave or wear deodorant... its a very natural place. There are people from all over the US and some from abroad. Geographically Bennington is very diverse, in other most other respects, it is not diverse at all.

Shapely. Ba-dah-dah. The campus has a very strong LGBT population. Some of my female friends freshman year graduated as males. They're accepted, which is no surprise for how liberal the place is. My freshmen year there were demonstrations to support campus nudity. Basically, very very liberal types. Unfortunately the racial diversity is low, which surprised me. That and we're all on financial aid. Bennington is notoriously expensive, but almost nobody pays the whole thing. We all have loans to comiserate over.

I think Bennington students are pretty friendly for the most part. We are a mostly white school, (an issue the Admissions Office has really been thinking about lately), but have a huge range of socioeconomic diversity. While everyone is very open about sexuality, students have seemed hostile towards religion, as well as towards more conservative attitudes. People seem too wrapped up in their work to follow sports, politics, etc. (Not only do we not have sports at Bennington... we only have one or two television sets. For the entire campus. I view this as a good thing.) Bennington students are from all over the place. While a lot come from New York and the New England area, I know tons of students from Oregon, as well as California, the mid-West, and the South. We also have a small international population, which isn't surprising for such a tiny liberal arts school. I think a student who wasn't self-motivated and needed a tremendous of guidance, or on the other hand was looking for a conservatory education would not like Bennington. Students with strong religious beliefs or very conservative views might not feel comfortable, either.

This is not a diverse campus. That's simply a fact about Bennington. But at the same time, there is a wide diversity of personalities on this campus that I feel make up for it. Everyone here is really passionate about something, and everyone has different things that they're into. So there is a diversity of ideas, I'd say. Bennington isn't racially diverse, or even very socio-economically diverse. But there is a lot to be said for the fact that everyone here is completely and utterly unique; mind-bogglingly so, actually. People here are weird. The good kind of weird, the fascinating kind of weird. And everyone you meet will be intriguing to you in some way. I have not disliked any student on this campus. The only way a Bennington student can feel left out, it seems, is if they feel too normal. I myself haven't experienced this. Everyone dresses however they want to, and its really very diverse and funky. And almost everyone on the campus is creatively inclined one way. I've known students who study computer science who are into composing, and math students who apply their knowledge to art. Bennington embodies the ideal of liberal arts: application of knowledge in all fields of study to the arts.

Most Bennington students are either from the Northeast or the SouthWest. There aren't really any cliques.