Emerson College

Emerson is a communications and arts college on Boston Common, organised into three schools — Film, Television and Media Arts; Communication; and Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies — with no science or engineering offer at all. Its English requirement is unusually steep at TOEFL 95 with no section below 20, which is a genuine academic threshold for a college built on writing, performance and production rather than an administrative hurdle. Against that, Emerson waives its USD 70 application fee for every international applicant, which is rare, and submitting an SAT or ACT automatically removes the English exam requirement. The other distinctive feature is geographic. Tuition is identical whether a student studies in Boston, at Emerson Los Angeles, or at Kasteel Well, the college's castle campus in the Netherlands, and further programmes run in Valencia, Barcelona, Paris, Lugano, Buenos Aires and Washington DC. Several majors require a creative sample submitted after the application itself.