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 (through March 31, 2010)
D.Phil. (1981) Oxford
Adam F. Falk, President-Elect (term begins April 1, 2010)
Ph.D. (1991) Harvard
Faculty
Voting membership of the faculty: 318
Tenured faculty as a percentage of voting membership: 62%
Percent of the faculty hold doctorates or other terminal degrees: 96%
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.
Faculty are distinguished by the number of prizes won, including MacArthur Fellowship, 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.
Virtually all faculty members engage in research activities that complement their 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 research from many sources, including the federal and state governments, corporations, foundations, nonprofit agencies, individuals, and the college. Recently, these have included the American Chemical Society, Dreyfus Foundation, Ellsworth Kelly, Ford Foundation, Fulbright Foundation, Getty Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, Institute of Museum and Library Services, RobertWood Johnson Foundation, W.M. Keck Foundation, Maryland Film Festival, Massachusetts Cultural Council, AndrewW. Mellon Foundation, NASA, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, National Institute of Standards & Technology, Space Telescope Science Institute, Starr Foundation, Teagle Foundation, Terra Foundation, U.S. Geological Survey, LilaWallace Foundation, and Whiting Foundation. Grants and awards in support of faculty research between July 1, 2008 and June 30, 2009 totaled $4,525,464.
Staff
| Administrative Staff | 290 FTE |
|---|---|
| Support Staff | 449 FTE |
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Students
Enrollment (Fall 2009)
| Undergraduate | Graduate | |
|---|---|---|
| Total | 2,168 | 56 |
| Men | 1,046 | 20 |
| Women | 1,122 | 36 |
| Non-U.S. enrollment | 7% |
|---|---|
| U.S. minority enrollment | 32% |
Class of 2013 Admission Statistics
| Applied: | 6,017 |
|---|---|
| Admitted: | 1,229 |
| Percent admitted: | 20.4% |
| Entered: | 548 |
| Early decision as percentage of entering class: |
42% |
| American students of color: | 34% |
Geographically, New York is the largest state represented, followed by Massachusetts and California.
2009-10 Comprehensive Fee
| Tuition: | $39,250 |
|---|---|
| Board, room, & fees: | $10,630 |
| Total: | $49,880 |
Class of 2013 Financial Aid Statistics
| Percent receiving Williams aid | 53% |
|---|---|
| Median financial aid award | $39,756 |
| Range of awards | $2,339 - $56,699 |
| Range of family income of students assisted | $0 - $230,295 |
Major Fields of Study
The five-year average distribution of majors, 2005-09:
- American studies 12
- Anthropology 6
- Art 62
- Asian studies 6
- Astronomy 1
- Astrophysics 3
- Biology 55
- Chemistry 29
- Chinese 8
- Classics 6
- Comparative Literature 7
- Computer Science 12
- Economics 92
- English 65
- French 5
- Geosciences 9
- German 3
- History 55
- Japanese 3
- Mathematics 48
- Music 7
- Philosophy 18
- Physics 13
- Political Economy 12
- Political science 59
- Psychology 58
- Religion 8
- Russian 2
- Sociology 6
- Spanish 9
- Theatre 6
- Women's Studies 4
(Note: Approximately 39% of students graduate as double majors.)
Completion Statistics
Of the 533 first-year students who entered in 2003, 93% 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 asWilliams/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. About half of the junior class (276 students) participated in off-campus study options in 2008-09.
Athletics
Approximately 44 percent of all students participate in intercollegiate sports (36 percent at the varsity level). There are 34 varsity intercollegiate teams (17 men’s and 17 women’s), 10 JV teams, 20 club teams, and a large intramural program.
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 offcampus interviews with employers and graduate schools. We also provide a comprehensive website with databases containing thousands of job and internship opportunities.
Alumni
There are 27,205 living alumni of record, and 75 regional alumni associations nationwide and overseas. Alumni participation in the 2008-09 Alumni Fund was 59%. More than 57% of the alumni from the classes of 1980 to 2000 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 2008-09 operating expenditures: | $179,399,164 |
|---|---|
| Gifts from private support: | $38,899,260 |
| Investment Pool (Market value as of 6/30/09): | $1,409,055,720 |
The Campus
450-acre campus and 2,900 outlying acres, including the Hopkins Memorial Forest (2,600 acres). The college operates more than 170 academic, athletic, and residential buildings including the new Williams College Child Care Center, Schapiro Hall, North Academic Building, and the Paresky Center.
Libraries
There are 891,400 volumes in the Sawyer and Schow Science libraries and 64,100 in Chapin Rare Books Library; 34,000 paper and electronic periodical subscriptions; 480,300 microtexts; 30,500 sound recordings; 12,000 videos; 394,500 government documents; and 4,945 cubic feet of archival material. Services include research and reference assistance, user education, and automated access to the collection and more than 340 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 232,500 books, bound periodicals, and auction sales catalogues, with current journal subscriptions numbering around 670. 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 five million volumes.
Information Technology
The Office for InformationTechnology (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 software for teaching and course management. The OIT staff support 80 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 13,000 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 and includes the largest collection in the world of works by the brothers Charles and Maurice Prendergast. 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.
Child Care Center
The Williams College Child Care Center serves children infancy through pre-school five days per week, full days from 8 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. If space permits, part time schedules will be accommodated either part week or part day. A school age program is available for children ages 5-12 in the afternoon. In the summer and school vacations school age children are offered a full day program five days per week.
Summer programs on campus (Conference Office)
Williamstown Theatre Festival, Science Research Students’ Programs, Williams Summer Science Program, Williams Humanities and Social Science Program, Williams College Undergraduate Research Colloquium, Williams College Summer Institute in American Foreign Policy, Massachusetts Teachers Association, NSF Chemistry Program, ARIA International Summer Academy, Overland Summer Programs, NIKE Golf, NIKE Tennis, and many other camps and clinics run by U.S. Sports Camps and Williams coaches, and alumni programs.
More Information
Telephone
| Main Switchboard | 413-597-3131 |
|---|---|
| Admission | 413-597-2211 |
| Alumni Relations | 413-597-4151 |
| Dean of the Faculty | 413-597-4351 |
| Dean of the College | 413-597-4171 |
| 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 | alumni.williams.edu |
| Athletics | williams.prestosports.com |
| Career Counseling | www.williams.edu/go/careers |
| Child Care Center | www.williams.edu/resources/childrenscenter |
| 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 |
| 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-Mystic Program | www.williams.edu/williamsmystic |
This publication was prepared by the Williams College Office of Public Affairs. December 2009.