University of Redlands

Private · Moderately Selective · CA

Photo: inkknife_2000 (CC BY-SA 2.0)

School data & stats

TypePrivate

LocationCA · West

SettingUrban

Undergrads2,049

Student:faculty10:1

Outcomes

4-yr grad rate55.6%

6-yr grad rate67.3%

Drop-out rate16%

Study abroad—

Cost

In-state tuition$61k

Out-of-state tuition$61k

Application fee—

Community

Racial diversity65.5%

Gender diversity56.4%

International0.9%

Identity—

Overview

The University of Redlands is a private liberal-arts university in Redlands, California, between Los Angeles and Palm Springs, built around an orange-grove-lined quad and a personalized approach to undergraduate education. It balances a traditional College of Arts and Sciences curriculum against one of the more unconventional alternative-education experiments in American higher education, giving it a dual identity as both a conventional and an unconventional liberal-arts school.

Academics

The Johnston Center for Integrative Studies is Redlands' signature distinctive feature — students in the Johnston program design their own individualized majors, negotiate learning contracts with faculty instead of taking a fixed course grid, and receive narrative evaluations rather than letter grades, one of the longest continuously running alternative-education programs of its kind in the country. Outside Johnston, business, communicative disorders, and environmental studies are consistently popular, and the university's small size supports close faculty mentorship across both tracks.

Campus & student life

The Redlands campus is known for its historic architecture and orange-grove setting, a quieter Southern California landscape than the coastal image the state usually conjures. Housing is largely residential for underclassmen, and student culture divides loosely between the more traditional mainstream population and the smaller, tightly bonded Johnston community, whose self-governance and consensus-based house meetings are a distinct campus subculture.

Getting in

Redlands' application reads differently depending on track — Johnston applicants are expected to articulate real intellectual independence and a clear sense of what a self-designed course of study would look like, while general-track applicants go through a more conventional holistic liberal-arts review emphasizing essays and fit.

After graduation

Graduates go on to a wide range of graduate programs and careers, with communicative sciences and disorders in particular feeding directly into speech-language-pathology graduate programs; the Johnston Center's alumni network is unusually close and self-identified, given the program's small size and unconventional structure.

Worth knowing

A prospective student who wants the self-designed, ungraded Johnston Center experience should apply directly into it — it functions almost as a separate college within the university, with its own admissions emphasis, housing, and governance culture distinct from the rest of campus.

redlands.edu ↗

Admissions

Acceptance rate82.7%

Enrolled mid-50%SAT 1107–1350 · ACT 21–28

Test policyoptional

Rec letters2

Deadlines (2026–27 cycle)

Early actionNov 15

Regular decisionJan 15

Applying