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
Morton Owen Schapiro
B.S. Hofstra University
Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania
Faculty
Voting membership of the faculty: 323
Tenured faculty as a percentage of voting membership: 58%
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. Awards for the past year totaled approximately $2.4 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, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Institute of Museum and Library Services, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, W.M. Keck Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, 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, and the Lila Wallace Foundation.
National Awards
Faculty are distinguished by the number of national prizes won, including MacArthur Fellowship, Poet Laureate, Deborah and Franklin Tepper Haimo Distinguished Teaching Award of the Mathematical Association of America, 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, Field Hockey Hall of Fame, and National Soccer Coaches Association of America Div. III Soccer Coach of the Year.
Staff
| Administrative Staff | 288 FTE |
|---|---|
| Support Staff | 457 FTE |
Students
Enrollment (Fall 2007)
| Undergraduate | Graduate | |
|---|---|---|
| Total | 2,112 | 49 |
| Men | 1,037 | 18 |
| Women | 1,075 | 31 |
| Non-U.S. enrollment | 7% |
|---|---|
| U.S. minority enrollment | 29% |
2007-08 Comprehensive Fee
| Tuition: | $35,438 |
|---|---|
| Board, room, & fees: | $9,702 |
| Total: | $45,140 |
Class of 2011 Admission Statistics
| Applied: | 6,448 |
|---|---|
| Admitted: | 1,194 |
| Percent admitted: | 18.5% |
| Entered: | 540 |
| Early decision as percentage of entering class: |
40% |
| American students of color: | 31% |
Geographically, New York is the largest state represented, followed by Massachusetts and California.
Class of 2011 Financial Aid Statistics
| Percent receiving Williams aid | 51% |
|---|---|
| Average financial aid award | $35,513 |
| Range of awards | $4,150 - $49,350 |
| Range of family income of students assisted | $0 - $190,000 |
Major Fields of Study
The five-year average distribution of majors, 2003-07:
- American studies 16
- Anthropology 7
- Art 56
- Asian studies 4
- Astronomy 1
- Astrophysics 5
- Biology 52
- Chemistry 23
- Chinese 5
- Classics 5
- Comparative Literature 7
- Computer Science 7
- Economics 87
- English 68
- French 4
- Geosciences 11
- German 3
- History 54
- Japanese 2
- Literary Studies 2
- Mathematics 42
- Music 6
- Philosophy 12
- Physics 12
- Political Economy 12
- Political science 66
- Psychology 68
- Religion 8
- Russian 2
- Sociology 5
- Spanish 9
- Theatre 6
- Women's Studies 4
(Note: Approximately 26 percent of students graduate as double majors.)
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
Experiential learning at Williams fits with the college's broad philosophy of enhancing student capacity to improve society. Involving "learning by doing" outside the Williams classrooms, experiential learning has been a successful part of the Williams curriculum for a number of years. In addition to the use of laboratory work in the natural sciences and studio work in art, faculty have been challenging students to become engaged in their learning through field work whether in the form of research, placement in community organizations, or special projects. Courses with an experiential education component range from fully integrated off-campus programs such as Williams at Mystic to courses involving field research projects.
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. Nearly half of the junior class (225 students) participated in off-campus study options in 2005-06.
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.
Completion Statistics
Of the 520 first-year students who entered in 2001, 91% graduated from Williams within four years and 95% within six years.
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-campus interviews with employers and graduate schools. Finally, it provides a comprehensive website with databases containing thousands of job and internship opportunities.
topAlumni
There are 26,500 living alumni of record, and 75 regional alumni associations nationwide and overseas. Alumni participation in the 2006-07 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
2006-07
| Operating expenditures: | $163,633,969 |
|---|---|
| Gifts from private support: | $51,035,452 |
| Endowment: | $1,892,054,673 (Market value as of 6/30/07) |
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 Art Museum, libraries, an observatory, a student health center, a chapel, and a Jewish religious center.
Libraries
There are 880,000 volumes in the Sawyer, Schow Science, and Matt Cole libraries and 60,000 in Chapin Rare Books Library; 15,945 paper and electronic periodical subscriptions; 480,000 microtexts; 30,000 sound recordings; 10,800 videos; 394,000 government documents; and 4,795 cubic feet of archival material. Services include reference assistance, user education, and automated access to the collection and more than 150 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 211,000 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 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 principle mission is to encourage multidisciplinary teaching through encounters with art objects that traverse times and cultures. An active, collecting museum, its current strengths are in modern and contemporary art, photography, prints, and Indian painting. The museum is also 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, Council for the Advancement and Support of Education, Overland Student Travel, Suzuki in the Berkshires, Nike Golf, U.S. Sports Tennis & Volleyball camps, and many other sports camps and alumni programs, including RoadScholars in Williamstown.
More Information
| Area code 413 | |
|---|---|
| Main Switchboard | 597-3131 |
| Dean of the Faculty | 597-4351 |
| Dean of the College | 597-4171 |
| Admission | 597-2211 |
| Alumni Relations | 597-4151 |
| Office of Public Affairs | 597-4277 |
This publication was prepared by the Office of Public Affairs. It is available in print and online. Institutional research can be accessed at www.williams.edu/admin/provost/ir. Additional information about Williams College is available at www.williams.edu.
Williams College
880 Main Street, Williamstown, Mass. 01267