Colleges That Look Like Castles (And the Ones You Can Live In)

Most lists of castle colleges are really lists of nice Gothic buildings. Pointed windows, grey stone, a tower somewhere in the photo. Fine, but not a castle.

These nineteen are the real thing, and at one of them you can be assigned a room inside it. Grey Towers Castle at Arcadia is an ordinary first-year residence hall.

No special application, no lottery, three to six students to a room, in a National Historic Landmark.

Most of these are one great building on an otherwise ordinary campus. At three of them the whole place is built that way. And five of them exist because a governor of Illinois liked castles and made the state build them, which is the strangest story on this page.

Every school below links to our profile for it, so you can put the net price and the acceptance rate next to the photograph before you fall for it.

All nineteen, and what each building does now

Every school name links to our profile for it, where you can see the net price and the acceptance rate. Both matter more than the architecture and neither shows up in a photo.

Campuses with one castle on them

One spectacular building, the rest of the campus normal. This is the usual shape, and the building is almost always the one on the brochure.

Arcadia University, Grey Towers Castle

This is the one. Arcadia put its castle to work as a first-year residence hall, with rooms holding three to six students. You do not apply for it specially or win a lottery. You are a first year, and you live in a castle.

It was built between 1893 and 1898 for the Harrison family, in grey stone quarried nearby, and the architect took his cue from Alnwick Castle in England without copying it. It became a National Historic Landmark in 1985.

Alnwick is a nice coincidence if you came here from the other side of this topic: it is one of the places the Harry Potter films used, which is why Arcadia turns up on lists of colleges that look like Hogwarts as well as this one. The difference is that here you can sleep in it.

Kenyon College, Old Kenyon

Begun in 1827, first occupied in 1829, and one of the earliest Collegiate Gothic buildings in the country. The walls are four feet thick at the base.

It burned in 1949 and nine students died. Kenyon took the walls down stone by stone, put a fireproof steel frame inside and rebuilt them exactly as they had stood. It is a residence hall again today, 150 students, mostly upperclass, in singles and doubles.

University of Tampa, Plant Hall

This one was a hotel. The Tampa Bay Hotel opened in 1891, 511 rooms, silver minarets and domes on the roof, built to beat every other winter resort in the country. Teddy Roosevelt stayed there. So did Babe Ruth.

Now those rooms are classrooms, labs and offices, and Tampa runs a museum in one wing so you can see what the hotel looked like. The minarets are on the university's logo, on the city's postcards, and outside the window of a normal Tuesday lecture.

Boston College, Gasson Hall

Gasson was not converted from anything. Boston College bought a farm in Chestnut Hill in 1907 and built this first, on purpose, as the centrepiece, opening in 1912. The tower carries four bells and the rotunda has a marble Archangel Michael standing over Lucifer.

It is also the hardest school on this page to get into, which is worth saying out loud, because the rest of this list is much more reachable than it looks.

Fairleigh Dickinson, Hennessy Hall

A hundred rooms, finished in 1897 for Florence Vanderbilt and Hamilton Twombly, designed by the firm behind half of Gilded Age New York, and modelled on a wing of Hampton Court. The grounds were laid out by Frederick Law Olmsted, the man who did Central Park.

Florence lived there until 1952. Fairleigh Dickinson bought it in 1958 and the mansion now holds classrooms, offices, a cafe and the student mailroom. Collecting a parcel in a Vanderbilt house is a very specific kind of ordinary.

Washington University in St Louis, Brookings Hall

The gate you have seen even if you have never been to St Louis. Cope and Stewardson finished it in 1902 in red granite and limestone, with two towers over an archway, and it stood in as the administration building for the 1904 World's Fair.

The inscription over the east arch reads: if you wish to learn, enter, we welcome you. WashU graduates walk out through it.

City College of New York, Shepard Hall

The biggest surprise on this list, because nobody expects a neo-Gothic cathedral of a building in Harlem. George Post designed it in 1907, it is a New York City landmark and on the National Register, and the Great Hall inside is one of the largest rooms in the city.

It is also, by a distance, the cheapest way onto this page. City College has a net price under four thousand dollars a year, which is less than a tenth of what some of the private castles here cost.

Fordham University, Keating Hall

Keating went up in 1935 with a clock tower at the centre of the Rose Hill campus in the Bronx, and it has been the backdrop to every commencement since 1936.

If the building looks familiar, it is because Fordham gets used constantly as a film location for anything set at a fictional old university.

Manhattanville University, Reid Castle

Built between 1888 and 1892 for Whitelaw Reid, in Gothic castle style, with grounds by Olmsted again. Manhattanville bought the estate after the war and now uses it for the welcome centre, admissions and financial aid, plus a busy calendar of weddings.

So your first hour on campus is inside the castle, and most of the next four years is not.

Salve Regina University, Ochre Court

A Newport mansion from 1892, built for Ogden Goelet, given to the Sisters of Mercy in 1947 and turned into the college that became Salve Regina. It is the main administration building now, and admissions sits inside it.

The rest of the campus is more Newport mansions, which is the part that makes it unusual. The whole college is basically a street of them.

Boston University, the Castle

A Tudor Revival house finished in 1915 for William Lindsey, who made his money on a cartridge belt patent, and modelled on Athelhampton Hall in Dorset. Everyone at BU just calls it the Castle.

It was the home of BU's presidents from 1939 to 1967, and one of them used it to host more than 20,000 students for a conversation series. It is an alumni centre and event space now, so you will get inside it, just not for a lecture.

Where the whole campus is the castle

Three schools did not stop at one building. Everything you walk past for four years is built the same way, which is a different experience from admiring one tower on your way to a concrete lecture hall.

Rhodes College, all of it

Rhodes is the only school here where the answer is the entire campus. Every building since 1925 is Collegiate Gothic in Arkansas sandstone, Indiana limestone and Vermont slate, and the trustees passed a resolution that the college would never deviate from it. New buildings still follow the rule.

Condé Nast Traveler put it better than we can: at Rhodes, you feel like you could be at a castle rather than a college.

Sewanee, the Domain

Sewanee sits on 13,000 acres of Tennessee mountain that the university calls the Domain, and most of the college is built from sandstone quarried on that land. All Saints' Chapel was begun in 1905, left unfinished for fifty years, and completed in the 1950s.

Walking Sewanee in fog is the closest thing in America to walking a Scottish university, and the students wear academic gowns to class, which does not hurt the effect.

Berry College, the Ford Complex

The English Gothic buildings at Berry exist because Henry and Clara Ford visited the founder in 1923 and kept writing cheques afterwards. Clara Hall and Mary Hall are residence halls, and the same complex holds the dining hall and the admissions office.

So at Berry the castle buildings are just where the day happens. You eat in one, sleep in another, and get interviewed in a third. The campus around them runs to 27,000 acres, which is the largest in the country and a different kind of showing off.

The governor who made Illinois build castles

This is the strangest entry on the list, and it explains five buildings at once.

John Altgeld was governor of Illinois from 1893 to 1897. He liked medieval castles, and he wanted the state buildings put up during his term to look like them.

Five castle-style buildings went up across the state's schools as a result. Three of them are called Altgeld Hall today, and students have been calling the whole set Altgeld's Folly ever since.

The oldest building still standing on the Quad at Illinois State is Cook Hall, finished in 1897, and it started life as a gymnasium. Everyone on campus calls it the Old Castle.

At Northern Illinois the cornerstone drew a crowd of 30,000 people in 1895, and when Altgeld Hall opened in 1899 it was the whole university. The University of Illinois version was finished in 1897 as the library, in pink limestone, and Southern Illinois opened its own in December 1896.

The fifth is Old Main at Eastern Illinois, finished in 1899, which the university itself calls one of Altgeld's castles.

When it turned a hundred, Eastern marked the anniversary with an exhibit called Castle in a Cornfield, which is the best description of this whole section anyone has managed.

Four of the five are large public universities that take most of the students who apply, so this is the cheapest way onto the list after City College.

What living in one is really like

Nobody tells you this part, so here it is. Old buildings are cold in odd places and warm in others, because the heating was designed for a family of twelve and now serves a hundred students.

The windows are beautiful and they leak. Wifi through three feet of stone is a genuine problem, and the fix is usually a router in your room rather than a complaint that goes anywhere.

Lifts are rare and stairs are many. If you have any mobility need at all, ask which floor you would be on before you accept the room, because a listed building cannot be altered as freely as a modern block.

None of that is a reason to say no. It is a reason to ask three questions on your tour: can students live in this building, will I have class in it, and what happens when something breaks.

Frequently asked questions

Which college has a real castle you can live in?

Arcadia University is the headline: Grey Towers Castle is a first-year residence hall, rooms of three to six, no special application. Kenyon puts upperclass students in Old Kenyon, which has walls four feet thick and dates from 1827.

Berry College uses its castle buildings as ordinary dorms and dining halls. Everywhere else on this list, you will be studying in the castle or visiting it rather than sleeping in it.

What counts as a castle campus?

The building has to look like a castle: towers, battlements, heavy stone, the silhouette you would draw if someone asked you for a castle. Some of these were built as private homes, one was a hotel, and several were built as ordinary academic buildings that were made to look medieval on purpose.

A grand old mansion does not count, however lovely, because it is a different building with a different feeling. If it is the wizarding-school mood you are after rather than the shape, our list of colleges that look like Hogwarts covers that side.

Are these colleges hard to get into?

Mostly not, and that surprises people. Boston College, Boston University and Washington University are genuinely selective, but Arcadia, Manhattanville, Illinois State, Eastern Illinois, Northern Illinois and Fordham all admit a majority of applicants.

The castle tells you nothing about the odds. Check the acceptance rate on each profile.

What is the cheapest castle campus?

City College of New York, and it is not close. Shepard Hall is a landmark neo-Gothic building in Harlem and CUNY's net price is under four thousand dollars a year.

After that the Illinois castles are the value picks, because four of the five Altgeld buildings sit at large public universities. The private castles on this list run several times higher.

Why are there so many castles at Illinois state schools?

One governor. John Altgeld ran Illinois from 1893 to 1897, he loved medieval castles, and he pushed for state buildings put up in his term to look like them.

Five went up across the state system, three of them now named Altgeld Hall, and students still call the whole set Altgeld's Folly. It is the only case on this list where the castles exist because of politics rather than money.

Bottom line

A castle is a real reason to like a college. It is not a reason to pick one, and the thirteen here differ far more in price and in how hard they are to get into than they do in how good the photos look.

Start with the row in the table that says you would be inside the building every day, because that is the only version of this that changes your life rather than your photographs.

Then open the profile, look at the net price, and decide like it is any other college. It just happens to have a tower.