SUNY College at Brockport

The State University of New York College at Brockport is a high-performing liberal arts institution in a quiet part of the state.

A public institution founded as Brockport Collegiate Institute in 1835, and Brockport State Normal School from 1866 to 1942, much of the early part of SUNY Brockport’s history was as a teacher training college. The immediate post-war period saw the college transformed, however, and hundreds of students became thousands.

The closest town to the Victorian village of Brockport, situated on the Erie Canal, is Rochester, 20 miles east. The university’s 465-acre campus is 60 miles from Buffalo, the same distance from Niagara Falls, arguably the country’s best-known landmark, 105 miles from the port city of Hamilton and 140 from Toronto, Canada’s most populous. SUNY Brockport is just over 10 miles south of Lake Ontario, the smallest of the Great Lakes.

William Fichtner, an actor who portrayed Alexander Malone on Prison Break and has also appeared in Crash, The Dark Knight, The Longest Dream, Independence Day: Resurgence and Date Night, and Stan Van Gundy, a National Basketball Association coach who has taken charge of the Miami Heat, the Orlando Magic and the Detroit Pistons, are among the college’s alumni, as is Dave Trembley, who managed baseball’s Baltimore Orioles.