Shepherd University

“A small public university in a historic Blue Ridge town, just 60 miles from Washington, DC.”

Shepherd University is a small public regional university of about 3,300 students set in Shepherdstown, West Virginia — a 300-year-old riverside town often described as one of the most walkable historic communities on the East Coast. The campus sits on a 323-acre stretch of the Eastern Panhandle, just above the Potomac River and roughly 60 miles from Washington, DC and 75 miles from Baltimore. That location gives international students rare access to two major US capitals and their internship markets while still living on a quiet, low-cost college-town campus where most things are reachable on foot. Academically, Shepherd is built around four colleges and roughly 100 majors, minors, and concentrations. Its strongest professionally-oriented programs are Nursing (BSN and Doctor of Nursing Practice), Education, Social Work, and Business, and it has growing offerings in Computer Science, Engineering, and the Sciences housed in the Robert C. Byrd Science and Technology Center. The 14:1 student–faculty ratio means most classes are small and taught by faculty rather than TAs, which is typical of regional public universities and a meaningful contrast to larger flagship campuses. What makes Shepherd genuinely distinctive is the Contemporary American Theater Festival (CATF), a nationally recognized professional theater festival that has been hosted on campus every summer since 1991. CATF has produced more than 150 new American plays — including dozens of world premieres — and has been called one of the country's top theater festivals by The New York Times. Combined with NCAA Division II athletics in the PSAC, the Robert C. Byrd Center for Congressional History, and a strong sense of small-town community, Shepherd offers a quieter, more affordable American campus experience than most of the schools at its price point.