Blaze Your Trail. Make an Impact.
90+ programs built for exploration, designed for your future.
MCLA gives you room to explore without limits. With more than 90 programs across arts, sciences, humanities, and professional fields, you can test your interests before committing to a path. Students here change majors, combine disciplines, or design their own degree through Interdisciplinary Studies. Faculty collaborate across departments to help you spot connections you might have missed. Advisors focus on guiding you towards a meaningful career, not just checking boxes with degree requirements. Start undeclared or shift direction midstream. Either way, you're supported. Curiosity becomes direction. Flexibility becomes agility.
MCLA’s liberal arts education teaches you how to think, adapt, and solve problems across disciplines. Students like you make their own customized combinations. You can pair environmental science with creative writing, philosophy with business, music with arts management.
Our 8:1 student-to-faculty ratio means you're known, not anonymous. Professors learn your name, follow your progress, and mentor you toward your goals. If no existing major fits, Interdisciplinary Studies lets you build your own. You get an academic foundation plus the freedom to build something of your very own when you're ready to push further.
Liberal Arts Without Limits
Start Undeclared. Find Your Fit.
Nearly half of college students change their major—at MCLA, that's part of the process. Take core classes, connect with faculty, and discover what pulls you in. Students talk about intro courses that "hooked" them or professors who saw potential they didn't know they had. You're here to discover more.
Interdisciplinary Studies: Your Degree, Your Design.
Can't find a major that fits? Create one. Interdisciplinary Studies lets you combine fields—anthropology, creative writing, environmental science—into a degree built around your goals.
Real-World Experience That Builds Life-Changing Perspective.
MCLA students have studied microscopy in South Africa, explored civil rights history in the American South, and immersed themselves in Japanese culture—often at little to no cost thanks to donor funding. These aren't tourist trips. They're academic experiences that shift how you see the world.
Mentorship That Goes Beyond Office Hours.
Faculty here collaborate across departments, creating opportunities to work on projects that don't fit neatly into one discipline. They challenge you, mentor you, and help you see possibilities you hadn't considered.
Success by the Numbers
Small School. Big Impact.
Here are a few #'s that speak for themselves.
Make Connections
Make Anything
Make Connections
Make Anything
“some of my favorite moments for this entire past year have been sitting after class with some of my peers and Professor Engelson, and just having some incredible discussions about writing, about life, about anything. I found just such a connection. I knew I was in the right place, surrounded by the right people.”
“I did go in undeclared just to fully scope out the options as a liberal arts school here. There’s so many amazing options to explore, so I wanted to fully experience that. But the psych department. I took an intro to psych course in it. Had the final hook on me.”
“Interdisciplinary Studies is crafting your own major. It’s pulling from other majors, interweaving a bunch of different kind of fields. And I came in with knowing that I wanted my concentration to be cultural studies. But since coming back to MCLA this past year, I have really, really been able to double down and pull in ideas from anthropology, sociology.”
“We have our new degree, Music Industry and Production, with which we send students through all typical music courses that one might find at another institution, but then we also send them through the arts management courses where they learn how to put on concerts and how to understand. Marketing and how to understand all things in the front end of the music business.”
“My freshman year, I had the opportunity to go to Cape Town, South Africa with Professor Anna J. Saint-Dar. My sophomore year, I got to go on the Civil Rights Bus Tour with Professor Eli Janis. And this past year I've got to go to Japan with Professor Kailai Huang.”
Voices from Our Community
Purpose. Connection. Belonging.
