About Williams
Established in 1793 with funds bequeathed by Colonel Ephraim Williams, the college is private, residential, and liberal arts, with graduate programs in the history of art and in development economics. The undergraduate enrollment is approximately 2,000 students.
Williams is committed to a need-blind admission policy by which it admits students without regard to their ability to pay, and commits to meeting 100 percent of each admitted student’s demonstrated financial need for four years.
There are three academic divisions (humanities, sciences, social sciences), 24 departments, 33 majors, plus concentrations and special programs. The student:faculty ratio is 7:1. The academic year consists of two four-course semesters plus a one-course January term.
Fraternities were phased out beginning in 1962. Coeducation was adopted in 1970. The school color is purple. The mascot is the Purple Cow. Sports teams are called “Ephs.”
Williamstown is located in the Berkshires in northwestern Massachusetts, 135 miles from Boston and 165 miles from New York City.
President
William G. Wagner, Interim President
B.A. Haverford College
D.Phil. University of Oxford
Faculty
Voting membership of the faculty: 312
Tenured faculty as a percentage of voting membership: 66%
Percent of the faculty hold doctorates or other terminal degrees: 97%
Research and Teaching
Williams is consistently ranked as one of the nation’s top liberal arts colleges and its faculty noted for the quality of their undergraduate teaching. Virtually all faculty members engage in important research activities that complement their strong commitment to teaching and the achievement of academic goals includes active participation of students with faculty in research.
Faculty are successful in winning support for their research from many sources, including the federal and state governments, corporations, foundations, nonprofit agencies, individuals, and the college. Research awards for the past year totaled approximately $3.2 million.
Outside grants and awards to support faculty research have included the American Chemical Society, Dreyfus Foundation, Ford Foundation, Fulbright Foundation, Getty Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, Institute of Museum and Library Services, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, W.M. Keck Foundation, Ellsworth Kelly Foundation, Massachusetts Cultural Council, Mellon Fund, NASA, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, New England Foundation for the Arts, Space Telescope Science Institute, Starr Foundation, Teagle Foundation, Terra Foundation, U.S. Geological Survey, Lila Wallace Foundation and Whiting Foundation.
National Academic Awards
Faculty are distinguished by the number of prizes won, including MacArthur Fellowship, Poet Laureate, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Robert Foster Cherry Award for Great Teachers, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching Professor of the Year, Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, Princeton University’s 250th Anniversary Visiting Professorship for Distinguished Teaching, American Astrophysical Society Award, Elliot Rudwick Prize, American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence, Lannan Literary Prize, National Book Award, National Poetry Services Manuscript Competition, Kurt Weill Award, Julia Child Cookbook of the Year Award, and the Deborah and Franklin Tepper Haimo Distinguished Teaching Award of the Mathematical Association of America.
Staff
| Administrative Staff | 299 FTE |
|---|---|
| Support Staff | 476 FTE |
Students
Enrollment (Fall 2008)
| Undergraduate | Graduate | |
|---|---|---|
| Total | 2,137 | 48 |
| Men | 1,044 | 5 |
| Women | 1,093 | 43 |
| Non-U.S. enrollment | 7% |
|---|---|
| U.S. minority enrollment | 29% |
Class of 2012 Admission Statistics
| Applied: | 7,552 |
|---|---|
| Admitted: | 1,281 |
| Percent admitted: | 18.5% |
| Entered: | 539 |
| Early decision as percentage of entering class: |
42% |
| American students of color: | 33% |
Geographically, New York is the largest state represented, followed by Massachusetts and California.
2008-09 Comprehensive Fee
| Tuition: | $37,400 |
|---|---|
| Board, room, & fees: | $10,130 |
| Total: | $47,530 |
Class of 2012 Financial Aid Statistics
| Percent receiving Williams aid | 50% |
|---|---|
| Average financial aid award | $40,656 |
| Range of awards | $3,000 - $55,792 |
| Range of family income of students assisted | $0 - $218,000 |
Major Fields of Study
The five-year average distribution of majors, 2004-08:
- American studies 13
- Anthropology 7
- Art 61
- Asian studies 5
- Astronomy 1
- Astrophysics 4
- Biology 54
- Chemistry 25
- Chinese 7
- Classics 5
- Comparative Literature 6
- Computer Science 12
- Economics 94
- English 68
- French 4
- Geosciences 9
- German 2
- History 54
- Japanese 3
- Mathematics 44
- Music 6
- Philosophy 16
- Physics 13
- Political Economy 13
- Political science 61
- Psychology 63
- Religion 6
- Russian 2
- Sociology 6
- Spanish 9
- Theatre 6
- Women's Studies 4
(Note: Approximately 32 percent of students graduate as double majors.)
Completion Statistics
Of the 539 first-year students who entered in 2002, 91% graduated from Williams within four years and 96% within six years.
The Williams Tutorial Program
The Tutorial Program offers students a distinctive opportunity to take a heightened form of responsibility for their own intellectual development. Tutorials place much greater weight than do regular courses — or even small seminars — on student participation. They aim to teach students how to develop and present arguments; listen carefully, and then refine their positions in the context of a challenging discussion; and respond quickly and cogently to critiques of their work. Since the program’s inception in 1988, students have ranked tutorials among the most demanding — and rewarding — courses they have taken at Williams.
Experiential Learning
We encourage and support the use of any of the experiential learning approaches in the curriculum as long as they are employed in academically rigorous ways. Courses with an experiential education component range from fully integrated off-campus programs such as Williams/Mystic to courses involving field research projects. Students are encouraged to think of community service and other work experiences as informal learning opportunities that can prepare them for curricular experiential learning. Furthermore, many faculty welcome students developing their community service interests into curricular fieldwork, whether as part of an existing course assignment or an independent study.
Off-campus study options
Williams students are enrolled in more than 150 programs worldwide, including the Williams-Exeter Programme at Oxford, Williams-Mystic Program in Maritime Studies, and Williams in New York. About half of the junior class (258 students) participated in off-campus study options in 2007-08.
Athletics
Approximately 40 percent of all students participate in intercollegiate sports (34 percent at the varsity level). There are 32 varsity intercollegiate teams (16 men’s and 16 women’s), 15 JV teams, 8 club sport teams, and 11 intramural sports.
Career Counseling
The Office of Career Counseling is a resource center that provides easy access to people, programs, and information so that students may plan more effectively for life after Williams. The office organizes its counseling and information resources around specific career fields as well as hosting panels at which alumni/ae discuss careers, opportunities, and lifestyles in all career fields. In addition, the office schedules on- and off-campus interviews with employers and graduate schools. We also provide a comprehensive website with databases containing thousands of job and internship opportunities.
topAlumni
There are 26,900 living alumni of record, and 75 regional alumni associations nationwide and overseas. Alumni participation in the 2007-08 Alumni Fund was 62%. More than 65% of the alumni from the classes of 1970 to 1990 have earned at least one graduate or professional degree. The most popular graduate disciplines for alumni are management, education, law, and health care.
Financial
| Audited 2007-08 operating expenditures: | $176,523,750 |
|---|---|
| Gifts from private support: | $54,786,706 |
| Endowment: | $1,808,279,967 (Market value as of 6/30/08) |
The Campus
450-acre campus and 2,900 outlying acres, including the Hopkins Memorial Forest (2,600 acres). The college operates more than 100 academic, athletic, and residential buildings including the new Paresky Center, ’62 Center for Theatre and Dance, Williams College Museum of Art, libraries, an observatory, a student health center, a chapel, and a Jewish religious center.
Libraries
There are 884,300 volumes in the Sawyer, Schow Science, and Matt Cole libraries and 61,350 in Chapin Rare Books Library; 30,504 paper and electronic periodical subscriptions; 480,000 microtexts; 30,400 sound recordings; 11,290 videos; 368,330 government documents; and 4,945 cubic feet of archival material. Services include reference assistance, user education, and automated access to the collection and more than 311 databases. A cooperative program with the library of the Clark Art Institute, one of the major art reference and research libraries in the country, provides on-site use of the institute’s collections. Its resources include approximately 216,750 books, bound periodicals, and auction sales catalogues, with current journal subscriptions numbering around 685. Williams is also a member of the Boston Library Consortium, with online borrowing access to more than 32 million volumes, and is a founding member of the NExpress consortium with similar access to over four million volumes.
Information Technology
The Office for Information Technology (OIT) provides computer services, equipment, and infrastructure to serve the academic and administrative needs of the college. Virtually every room on campus has both wired and wireless access to central systems and servers and to the Internet. OIT staff help faculty with project development using technology in teaching and research. The college also uses Blackboard software for course management. The OIT staff support 60 electronic classrooms, four media studios, 19 public computer labs, and more than 170 software packages. About 450 computers are replaced annually for faculty, staff, and labs. The email system delivers about 70,000 messages daily after rejecting about 750,000 for spam and viruses. The faculty/staff and student help desks offer support over the phone, in Jesup Hall, and through office visits. The college uses the PeopleSoft suite from Oracle as its primary administrative system for office and for individual self-service.
Williams College Museum of Art
The museum houses over 12,000 works that span the history of art. The museum’s mission is to encourage multidisciplinary teaching through encounters with art objects that traverse times and cultures. An active, collecting museum, its strengths are in modern and contemporary art, photography, prints, and Indian painting. The museum is noted for its stellar collection of American art from the late 18th century to the present. With the largest collection in the world of works by the brothers Charles and Maurice Prendergast, the museum is a primary center for study of these American artists in a transatlantic context of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Special exhibitions curated by museum staff, faculty, students, and guest curators focus on new scholarship and alternative perspectives. The museum commissions new art, and also emphasizes the development of innovative exhibitions that place art in a broad cultural context, explore the connections between past and present, and raise critical questions about the interpretation of art and the writing of art history.
Summer programs on campus (Conference Office)
Williamstown Theatre Festival, Science Research Students’ Programs, Williams Summer Science Program, Williams Humanities Pre-Enrollment Program, Williams College Undergraduate Research, Clark Art Institute Docents, Massachusetts Teachers Association, NSF Chemistry Program, Suzuki in the Berkshires, Aria International Summer Academy, Creative Capital Foundation, Nike Golf, U.S. Sports Tennis & Volleyball camps, and many other sports camps and alumni programs.
More Information
Telephone
| Main Switchboard | 413-597-3131 |
|---|---|
| Dean of the Faculty | 413-597-4351 |
| Dean of the College | 413-597-4171 |
| Admission | 413-597-2211 |
| Alumni Relations | 413-597-4151 |
| Office of Public Affairs | 413-597-4277 |
| President’s Office | 413-597-4233 |
Web
| Williams College | www.williams.edu |
|---|---|
| Academics | www.williams.edu/academics |
| Administrative Offices | www.williams.edu/admin |
| Admission | www.williams.edu/admission |
| Alumni | www.williams.edu/alumni |
| Career Counseling | www.williams.edu/go/careers |
| Conference Office | www.williams.edu/admin/conference |
| Experiential Education | www.williams.edu/admin/deanfac/exped |
| Information Technology | oit.williams.edu |
| Libraries | library.williams.edu |
| Sports Information | williams.prestosports.com/landing |
| Study Away Programs | www.williams.edu/dean/sa |
| Tutorial Program | www.williams.edu/admin/news/chronicle |
| Williams College Museum of Art | www.wcma.org |
| Williams-Exeter Program | www.williams.edu/dean/oxford |
| Williams in New York Program | www.williams.edu/resources/newyork |
| Williams-Mystic Program | www.williams.edu/williamsmystic |
This publication was prepared by the Williams College Office of Public Affairs. November 2008.