Welcome to Beacon College! Our website is a portal to information and discovery, about the College, about you, and about the rich connections that exist between us.
We are a proud undergraduate community, nationally ranked and internationally recognized for high academic standards, a devotion to the collegiate preparation of individuals who learn differently, and unparalleled student and graduate outcomes. The Beacon Experience embraces, supports, and challenges the best of us. You will like it here!
Now entering the College’s fourth decade, the Beacon community is deservedly proud of our legacy as the nation’s first accredited four-year (baccalaureate) institution of higher education specifically for students with learning differences. We continue to build on our legacy devoted to collegians with learning and attention issues and are privileged to expand our work across a growing number of countries.
Both on campus and beyond, I share with my colleagues an understandable pride in Beacon’s strides over the past several years; these have been nothing short of striking, exceeding even our most ambitious projections.
And yet, as changes have transformed our campus and strengthened our offerings, it is essential to emphasize what has endured. At Beacon College, we—every faculty member, staff person, and administrator—are devoted to helping our students create seamless transitions in their lives. Those transitions are often monumental and include: the move from living with parents to living independently; the mindset shift from relying upon the provision of learning accommodations to becoming a strong self-advocate and lifelong learner; and the continuum from high school to a satisfying college experience—possibly through graduate school—and, ultimately, to fulfilling careers.
Today’s accolades and soaring rankings attributable to our nation-leading student outcomes are gratifying; still, Beacon is a community that is never self-satisfied. Our work is too important.
Beacon College’s growth and evolution of recent years has been anything but haphazard – our ascent has been guided by careful and intentional planning and vigilance across the community. As you explore the College’s web presence, I invite you to become familiar with Beacon’s Strategic Plan, an institutional “call to action” destined to further transform the College over the years 2021 through 2025. Here you will find the substance of just how new academic programs and facilities, advances in assistive technology, innovative pre- and post-college initiatives, and a growing repertoire of extracurricular and co-curricular offerings will further elevate the “Beacon Experience” and our nation-leading student outcomes.
The institutional ambitions that I have outlined all too briefly above, and many others, are tangible expressions of our seriousness of purpose in fashioning a collegiate community through which students engage with the rich possibilities of the liberal arts tradition, thus discovering the greatest good of building happy, ethical, productive, and abundant futures.
As you step across the electronic threshold that is our web presence, I invite you to further explore Beacon for yourself—both here on our site and through an in-person visit to our Leesburg campus.
George Hagerty, Ed.D.
President