Lake Forest College

Lake Forest College is a private liberal arts college in Lake Forest, Illinois. Founded in 1857 as Lind University by a group of Presbyterian ministers, the college has been coeducational since 1876 and an undergraduate-focused liberal arts institution since 1903. Lake Forest enrolls approximately 1,500 students representing 43 states and 80 countries. Lake Forest offers 32 undergraduate major and minor programs in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, and features programs of study in pre-law, pre-medicine, communication, business, finance, and computer science. The majority of students live on the college's wooded 107-acre campus located a half-mile from the Lake Michigan shore, however, the population of commuting students has increased in the past few years. Lake Forest is affiliated with the Associated Colleges of the Midwest. The college has 23 varsity teams that compete in the NCAA Division III Midwest Conference. History Lake Forest College was founded in 1857 by Reverend Robert W. Patterson as a Presbyterian alternative to the Methodist Northwestern University in Evanston. It was originally named Lind University after Sylvester Lind, who had given $80,000 to launch the school. Patterson and his fellow Chicago Presbyterians established the town of Lake Forest and the university roughly halfway between Evanston and Waukegan two years after the Chicago and Milwaukee Railway began service from Chicago. They hired St. Louis landscape architect Almerin Hotchkiss to design the town of Lake Forest with a university park at its center. Hotchkiss used the area's wooded ravines and forest as guidelines to plat a park-like, curvilinear layout for the town.