Five College Life

Five College students are supported by a well-tested academic, social and technical infrastructure. Visit FiveColleges.edu for more information, but some examples of our support are below.

Meal Exchange: Students enrolled in a meal plan may arrange through their home campus food service office to have some meals at another campus.

In general, students arrange to have lunch at another campus without a specified reason. Students taking a course at another campus or taking part in an academically-related activity such as a performance or rehearsal early in the morning or in late afternoon are eligible to have breakfast or dinner at the campus where the course or activity takes place, if they are enrolled in a meal plan at their home campus.

Cross-Registration: Generally, a student may take through the interchange any of the 6,000 undergraduate courses offered at the five institutions, so long as the course falls within the field of liberal arts as defined by the students' home campus.

The FC Library System: The five libraries have an integrated, automated system that provides a unified catalog of their collections. The online catalog also furnishes information on circulation status, periodical holdings, and titles on order.

In the online catalog, University holdings are in one database and those of the four colleges in another. Both are accessible from any terminal or PC on either system. Users may switch easily between the two databases and replicate a search from one to the other.

Fare Free Bus: The campuses are linked by a fare-free bus system (PVTA/UMass Transit) that operates daily. Some routes make stops at local towns and shopping areas. Schedule information is available on the website (above) and in printed form on the buses.

For Additional Info, click here.



Mission and History: Five Colleges, Incorporated is a nonprofit educational consortium established in 1965 to promote the broad educational and cultural objectives of its member institutions, which include four private, liberal arts colleges and the Amherst campus of the state university. The consortium is an outgrowth of a highly successful collaboration in the 1950s among Amherst College, Mount Holyoke College, Smith College, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, which resulted in the founding of a fifth institution, Hampshire College, in 1970.

Click here for directions and maps to Five Colleges, Incorporated and the five colleges.

Five Colleges, Incorporated promotes and administers long-term forms of cooperation that benefit faculty, students, and staff. These include:

    * Shared use of educational and cultural resources and facilities, including a joint automated library system, open cross registration, and open theater auditions;
    * Joint departments and programs;
    * Inter-campus transportation.

Their proximity to one another in the Connecticut River Valley of western Massachusetts favors Five College collaboration, as does their commitment to the liberal arts and to undergraduate education. Five Colleges, Incorporated is a longstanding member of the Association for Consortial Leadership (ACL), a national organization of consortia.