Its 140-acre (57 ha) campus is in a residential community 35 miles (56 km) east of downtown Los Angeles, near the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains.

Pomona College was established as a coeducational and nonsectarian Christian institution on October 14, 1887, amidst a real estate boom and anticipated population influx precipitated by the arrival of a transcontinental railroad to Southern California.

[15][5][17] Classes first began at Ayer Cottage, a rental house in Pomona, California, on September 12, 1888, with a permanent campus planned at Piedmont Mesa four miles north of the city.

[15][18] That year, as the real estate bubble burst, making the Piedmont campus financially untenable, the college was offered the site of an unfinished hotel (later renamed Sumner Hall[14]) in the nearby, recently founded town of Claremont.

Seeking both, he pursued an alternative path inspired by the collegiate university model he observed at Oxford, envisioning a group of independent colleges sharing centralized resources such as a library.

[70][71] Its endowment grew steadily, due in part to the introduction in 1942 of a deferred giving fundraising scheme pioneered by Allen Hawley called the Pomona Plan, where participants receive a lifetime annuity in exchange for donating to the college upon their death.

[91][92] The college's ethnic diversity also began to increase,[93][94][95] and activists successfully pushed the consortium to establish black and Latino studies programs in 1969.

[104][105] In the 2000s, under president David W. Oxtoby, Pomona began placing more emphasis on reducing its environmental impact,[109][110] committing in 2003 to obtaining LEED certifications for new buildings[111][112] and launching various sustainability initiatives.

[114] These efforts, combined with Pomona's previously instituted[115] need-blind admission policy, resulted in increased enrollment of low-income and racial minority students.

[116][117] In 2008, it was discovered that Pomona's alma mater may have been originally written to be sung as the ensemble finale to a student-produced blackface minstrel show performed on campus in 1910.

[120][121] Seventeen workers who were unable to provide documentation were fired, drawing national media attention and sparking criticism from activists;[120][122] the dining hall staff voted to unionize in 2013.

[139] Pomona's 140-acre (57 ha) campus is in Claremont, California, an affluent suburban residential community[153] 35 miles (56 km) east of downtown Los Angeles.

[156][152] In its early years, Pomona quickly expanded from its initial home in Sumner Hall, constructing several buildings to accommodate its growing enrollment and ambitions.

[157][28] Starting in 1908, development of the campus was guided by master plans from architect Myron Hunt, who envisioned a central quadrangle flanked by buildings connected via visual axes.

[152] In 1923, landscape architect Ralph Cornell expanded on Hunt's plans, envisioning a "college in a garden" defined by native Southern California vegetation[152] but incorporating global influences in the tradition of the acclimatization movement.

[158][159] President James Blaisdell's decision to purchase undeveloped land around Pomona while it was still available later gave the college room to grow and found the consortium.

[182][183] Marston Quadrangle, a 5-acre (2 ha) lawn framed by California sycamore and coastal redwood trees, serves as a central artery for the campus, anchored by Carnegie on the west and Bridges Auditorium on the east.

[152] To its north is Alexander Hall, the college's central administration building,[151] and the Smith Campus Center (SCC), home to many student services and communal spaces.

On the north is "let only the eager, thoughtful and reverent enter here", and on the south is "They only are loyal to this college who departing bear their added riches in trust for mankind".

[201] Pomona operates under a shared governance model, in which faculty and students sit on many policymaking committees and have a degree of control over other major decisions.

[233] The college does not permit majoring in pre-professional disciplines such as medicine or law but offers academic advising for those areas[234][235] and 3‑2 engineering programs with Caltech, Dartmouth, and Washington University.

[243] The college operates several resource centers to help students develop academic skills in quantitative tasks,[244][245] writing,[246] and foreign languages.

[256] Study-away programs are available for Washington, D.C., Silicon Valley, and the Marine Biological Laboratory in Massachusetts, and semester exchanges are offered at Colby, Spelman, and Swarthmore colleges.

[259] During the 2015‍–‍2016 academic year, 175 employers hosted on-site informational events at the Claremont Colleges and 265 unique organizations were represented in 9 career fairs.

[294] Pomona considers various factors in its admissions process, placing greatest importance on course rigor, class rank, GPA, application essays, recommendations, extracurricular activities, talent, and character.

[347] Housing is offered in various configurations, including singles, one-room or two-room doubles, and "friendship suites" consisting of a cluster of rooms, often around a central common area.

[205] The college's alcohol policies are aimed at encouraging responsible consumption and include a strict ban of hard liquor on South Campus.

[413] It also operates the Pomona Academy for Youth Success (PAYS), a three-year pre-college summer program for local low-income and first-generation students of color.

[418][419] The tradition began in the summer of 1964, when two students, Laurie Mets and Bruce Elgin, conducted a research project seeking to find out whether the number occurs more often in nature than would be expected by chance.

[429][430][431][432] Pomona's campus is located immediately north of Claremont Station,[154] where the Metrolink San Bernardino Line train provides regular service to Los Angeles Union Station (the city's main transit hub)[433] and the Foothill Transit bus system connects to cities in the San Gabriel Valley and Pomona Valley.