Westmont Ranked Among the Nation’s Best

Recent college and university annual rankings continue to affirm Westmont as one of the top Christian liberal arts colleges in the nation. 

Payscale’s 2021 Best Universities and Colleges by Salary Potential shows that mid-career Westmont alumni, including those with a graduate degree, earn a median income of $127,700 after more than 10 years in the workforce. This places Westmont in the top 7% nationally among all four-year bachelor’s degree institutions with the highest ranking among all members of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU).

Westmont remains in the top tier of National Liberal Arts Colleges in the 2022 U.S. News and World Report rankings tied at No. 114. Westmont improved its percentage of classes under 20, and under 50. Westmont’s Student Excellence Score, which includes SAT/ACT standardized tests and high school class standing, jumped 13 points from last year.

Westmont is No. 186 in the Wall Street Journal/Times Higher Education College Rankings of more than 800 colleges and universities. Westmont has gained 78 spots in the WSJ rankings since they began in 2017. Westmont is also No. 66 in their Best Liberal Arts Colleges in the United States 2021 ranking.

Westmont is No. 2 in Niche’s 2022 Best Colleges with No Application Fee in California. 

Accomplished New Professors Join Faculty

Four new tenure-track professors have joined Westmont’s faculty this fall: Ben Carlson (physics), Dan Jensen (engineering), Gewnhi Park (psychology), and Alastair Su (history). 

Carlson joins the Westmont physics department from University of Pittsburgh, where he was a Samuel Langley postdoctoral fellow. He works on the ATLAS Experiment at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland, and has technical expertise on hadronic jet and missing transverse momentum triggers. He enjoys involving his students in his research, which focuses on dark matter and the subatomic particle Higgs boson. He earned a doctorate from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. 

Jensen joins the college as director of engineering to prepare adaptive engineers committed to blending science, engineering and the arts. A senior fellow at the International Design Center at Singapore University of Technology and Design and MIT, he spent 21 years teaching engineering mechanics at the U.S. Air Force Academy. The new engineering program blends courses in engineering, physics, mathematics and chemistry. He earned a doctorate in aerospace engineering from the University of Colorado at Boulder. 

Park examines how the body and mind interact and influence different cognitive and emotional processes and social interaction. Her research has examined the interaction between the brain and heart and how the cardiac vagal tone indicates how well the brain functions. She incorporates those findings into other self-regulatory systems, cognitive processing, and emotional processing. Park earned a doctorate in cognitive psychology from Ohio State University. 

Su teaches U.S. history and is completing his first book about America and the opium trade in the 19th century. He says his overarching goal is supporting students as they navigate what it means to be both a Christian and a citizen of the United States. He graduated from Harvard before earning a doctorate in history from Stanford University.