Marist College is a small, private, liberal arts college in Poughkeepsie, NY. The campus sits on a beautiful 210 acres overlooking the Hudson River (!). The school was rated as one of the best colleges in the country by the Princeton Review and has over 30,000 alumni all over the world. Bill O'Reilly, a former alum, recently gave one million dollars to the school's O'Keefe endowed scholarship for promising students in need. For students interested in studying abroad, Marist has over 50 study abroad/exchange programs available each year, as well as a campus in Italy.
Marist has a host of first year programs designed to help students successfully transition from high school into college. An interesting offshoot of this is Marist's philosophy on housing- the term "rites of passage" is used to describe a system in which students start off in a traditional dorm with residential advisers as freshman, and later gain access to more "mature" options such as suites, apartments, and even townhouses!
About 65% of students at Marist are involved in some type of athletic activity, and this number has been rising in the past few years.
