[2] The college's founder, Elizabeth Blodgett Hall,[3] had formerly been headmistress at Concord Academy, a private girl's school.

She concluded from her experience, and that of her colleagues, that for many students the latter two years of high school are wasted on repetitious and overly constrained work.

Many young students, she thought, are ready to pursue college-level academic work some time before the usual system asks it of them.

When envisioning the college in the early 1960s, Elizabeth Blodgett Hall deliberately named it nothing more than "Simon's Rock."

He oversaw a complete change in the associate's program, which was condensed into two years, eliminating the high school components.

That year, Bard College, based about 50 miles away in New York, took over Simon's Rock, which was having difficulty expanding enrollment due to what the school perceived as a failure to grow acceptance of its experimental model and the prospect of funding drying up from the Blodgett family's foundation.

In 2000, Simon's Rock became the first college in the United States to officially recognize International Workers' Day.

In 2001, Simon's Rock was instrumental in the founding of Bard High School Early College (BHSEC) in Manhattan.

On April 11, 2006, part of Carriage House, a residence in upper campus, burned in an electrical fire in the early morning.

On November 19, 2024, Provost John B. Weinstein announced that Simon's Rock would be relocated to Bard's newly purchased Massena Campus in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York (the former site of the Unification Theological Seminary) beginning in Fall 2025.

In an announcement on the website of Simon's Rock, Weinstein cited declining enrollment revenue and a "competitive market" of early-college offerings as reasoning for the relocation.

[2] Until a planned 2025 relocation,[2] Simon's Rock is located on a 275-acre (1.1-km²) campus in Great Barrington, a small town (pop.

[7] Over 40 concentrations are available, including art history, Asian studies, chemistry, mathematics, physics, and theater.

While many students receive associate degrees after two years and transfer to other institutions, around half stay and moderate into the Simon's Rock B.A.

There are only about 400 students (though due to its small size, large fluctuations in class enrollment and admissions are common), resulting in a very low student-to-faculty ratio, around 8:1.

[10] ACE courses include traditional gym classes, such as martial arts, swimming lessons, weight training, and so on, but extend to things like bowling, dodgeball, hackeysack, gardening, and scuba diving.

At the time that Simon's Rock earned its name (in the early 1920s), the woods that now surround it were part of the vast area of land called Great Pine Farm.