About
The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (CLAS), established in 1900, is the largest of the eleven colleges that make up The University of Iowa.
The College has more than 600 tenured and tenure-track faculty members devoted to teaching, research, and service to their disciplines, the university, and the state of Iowa. About 16,000 undergraduates are currently enrolled in the College, and about 2,300 graduate students are enrolled in programs offered by our departments.
During the last decade, the College has awarded more than 28,000 undergraduate degrees. There are currently about 140,000 living alumni of the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences.
CLAS students can choose from nearly 60 undergraduate majors. In any single year, the College awards about 70% of the University's undergraduate degrees and departments in the College also award about 45% of the University's graduate degrees.
The list below shows current U.S. News rankings of our graduate programs in comparison to those at other public universities:
- Writers' Workshop (Creative Writing) - #1
- Speech-Language Pathology (Dept. of Communication Sciences & Disorders) - #1
- Audiology (Dept. of Communication Sciences & Disorders) - #1
- Social Psychology (Dept. of Sociology) - #2
- Fine Arts overall (School of Art & Art History) - #4
- Printmaking - #2
- Painting & Drawing - #7
- Design - #7
- Paleontology (Dept. of Geoscience) - #5
- Plasma physics (Dept. of Physics & Astronomy) - #7
- Clinical psychology (Dept. of Psychology) - #8
- Political Science - #12
- English - #15
- History - # 17
- Sociology - #20
- Biology - #23
- Psychology - #25