Oberlin College
private liberal arts college in Oberlin, Ohio, United States
Oberlin College is a private liberal arts college and conservatory of music in Oberlin, Ohio, United States. Founded as the Oberlin Collegiate Institute in 1833, it is the oldest coeducational liberal arts college in the United States and the second-oldest continuously operating coeducational institute of higher learning in the world. The Oberlin Conservatory of Music is the oldest continuously operating conservatory in the United States.
In 1835, Oberlin became one of the first colleges in the United States to admit African Americans, and in 1837, the first to admit women (other than Franklin College's brief experiment of 1787–89). It has been known since its founding for progressive student activism.
The College of Arts & Sciences offers more than 60 majors, minors, and concentrations. Oberlin is a member of the Great Lakes Colleges Association and the Five Colleges of Ohio consortium.
History
The Oberlin Collegiate Institute (name changed later to Oberlin College in 1850) was founded in 1833. The college's founders wrote voluminously and were featured prominently in the press, especially the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator, in which the name Oberlin occurred 352 times by 1865. Original documents and correspondence survive and are readily available.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Oberlin College” as private liberal arts college in Oberlin, Ohio, United States. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as private liberal arts college in Oberlin, Ohio, United States. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q616591. VIAF identifies the subject as 157729247. The Library of Congress control number is n79099236. Authority coordinates are 41.293, -82.222. 5 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1833, 1835, 1837 and 1787.
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This entry incorporates text from “Oberlin College” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.