Oberlin College is a selective private liberal arts college in Oberlin, Ohio, noteworthy for having been the first American institution of higher learning to regularly admit female and black students. Connected to the college is the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, the oldest continuously operating conservatory in the country. The college's motto is "Learning and Labor." While its school colors are often casually referred to as "crimson and gold," they are actually cardinal red and mikado yellow. Those colors were formally designated for the college by a faculty committee in 1889 and were drawn from the family coat of arms of John Frederick Oberlin. They remain in the official registry of school colors maintained by the American Council on Education. Oberlin is known to have more alumni earn PhDs than any other liberal arts college in the nation.

Oberlin is a member of the Great Lakes Colleges Association and the Five Colleges of Ohio consortium.

Both the college and the town of Oberlin were founded in 1833 by a pair of Presbyterian ministers, John Jay Shipherd and Philo P. Stewart. The ministers named their project after Jean-Frédéric Oberlin, an Alsatian minister whom they both admired. Oberlin attained prominence because of the influence of its second president, the evangelist Charles Finney, after whom one of the College's chapels and performance spaces is named. Asa Mahan (1800–1889) served as Oberlin's first president from 1835–1850.

The college was built on 500 acres (2 km²) of land specifically donated by the previous owner, who lived in Connecticut. Shipherd and Stewart's vision was for both a religious community and school. For a more detailed history of the founding of the town and the college, see Oberlin, Ohio.

Oberlin has long been associated with progressive causes. Its founders bragged that "Oberlin is peculiar in that which is good." Oberlin was the first college in the United States to regularly admit African-American students (1835) after a casting vote by Rev. John Keep. It is also the oldest continuously operating coeducational institution, since having admitted four women in 1837. These four women, who were the first to enter as full students, were Mary Kellogg (Fairchild), Mary Caroline Rudd, Mary Hosford, and Elizabeth Prall. All but Kellogg graduated. Mary Jane Patterson graduated in 1862 to become the first black woman to earn a B.A. degree. The college was listed as a National Historic Landmark on December 21, 1965 for its significance in admitting African-Americans and women. The college had some difficult beginnings, Rev. Keep and William Dawes were sent to England to raise funds for the college in 1839–40.

One historian called Oberlin, "the town that started the Civil War" due to its reputation as a hotbed of abolitionism. Oberlin was a key stop along the Underground Railroad. In 1858, both students and faculty were involved in the controversial Oberlin-Wellington Rescue of a fugitive slave, which received national press coverage. Two participants in this raid, Lewis Sheridan Leary and John Anthony Copeland, along with another Oberlin resident, Shields Green, also participated in John Brown's Raid on Harpers Ferry. This heritage was commemorated on campus by the 1977 installation of sculptor Cameron Armstrong's "Underground Railroad Monument" (a railroad track rising from the ground toward the sky) and monuments to the Oberlin-Wellington Rescue and the Harper's Ferry Raid.

In 1970, Oberlin made the cover of Life Magazine as one of the first colleges in the country to have co-ed dormitories. The article featured two students who lived in French House. Originally, French House was only women but went co-ed in the fall of 1969 because there were not enough women who wanted to live there.

Historian Geoffrey Blodgett, a professor and graduate of Oberlin, pointed out that campus dorms caused anger among students during the 1960s. Students reacted vocally against the new dorms of the 1950s and 1960s (Dascomb, East, North and South), calling them expedient "slabs" of "sleeping and feeding space," and this protest soon took on other controversies, including the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War. Dascomb went from being the impetus for protest to the vehicle of social change in 1967 when it was transformed into a co-ed dorm during winter term of 1969. Hebrew House, as it was known, was set up as winter term project to operate similar to an Israeli kibbutz. The experiment was a success, and now all but one of Oberlin College's dormitories are coed. The Baldwin Cottage is open only to women and transgender students.

Of Oberlin's 2,800 or so students, roughly 2,200 are enrolled in the College of Arts & Sciences, a little over 400 in the Conservatory of Music, and the remaining 150 or so in both College and Conservatory under the five-year Double Degree program. Oberlin is the only private institution in the United States to have both a top ranked College and a top ranked conservatory of music.

The College of Arts & Sciences offers over 45 majors, minors and concentrations. Based on students graduating with a given major, its most popular majors over the last ten years have been (in order) English, Biology, History, Politics and Environmental Studies. The College's science programs are considered strong for a smaller liberal arts college, especially Chemistry and Neuroscience.