The mission of Antioch College is to provide a rigorous liberal arts education. The College awards Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Science degrees; the general education program includes courses in the arts, humanities, sciences, and social sciences as well as various interdisciplinary seminars.
The Colleges educational program is built around the three guiding principles that have been the hallmark of an Antioch College education:
- Commitment to excellence in scholarship
- Commitment to full-time periods in a cooperative work program that alternates with full-time study and supports the link between theory and practice
- Commitment to active engagement in the community and to social justice
The new program is further strengthened by new initiatives in the academic calendar, in employing communication technologies and in engaging with global diversity that embodies a new and vibrant approach to liberal arts education in the United States. The academic curriculum emphasizes a rigorous and interdisciplinary approach to the liberal arts, offering a small number of well-resourced academic disciplines facilitated by a seminar model of teaching and learning. With the early support and leadership of educators at the College, there is broad participation in a long-range planning effort to capture in detail the structure to support the new concept of an Antioch College education. In this planning effort, the curriculum has been designed to engender an understanding of the historical context and the intellectual roots of current issues while emphasizing contemporary issues of local, national and global importance such as governance, energy and food production and innovative alternatives to time-work approaches to academic and practical matters.
The College is the only non-profit liberal arts institution in the nation to require a comprehensive off-campus cooperative work program of all its students. Cooperative education links theory and practice and supports the development of independence and accountability. All students will alternate between terms of study and terms of full-time work (cooperative education). Learning to live and work productively in the community, and to participate in governance, will remain among the most important skills students will acquire in their learning and living within the community on and off campus.
