Williams College
Williams College is located in Williamstown, Massachusetts. It is a private not-for-profit, 4-year or above institution.
From Wikipedia: Williams College is a private liberal arts college in Williamstown, Massachusetts. It was established as a men’s college in 1793 with funds from the estate of Ephraim Williams, a colonist from the Province of Massachusetts Bay who was killed in the French and Indian War in 1755. Williams’s main campus is located in Williamstown, in the Berkshires in rural northwestern Massachusetts, and contains more than 100 academic, athletic, and residential buildings. There are 360 voting faculty members, with a student-to-faculty ratio of 6:1. As of 2022, the school has an enrollment of 2,021 undergraduate students and 50 graduate students. Following a liberal arts curriculum, Williams College provides undergraduate instruction in 25 academic departments and interdisciplinary programs including 36 majors in the humanities, arts, social sciences, and natural sciences. Williams offers an almost entirely undergraduate instruction, though there are two graduate programs in development economics and art history. The college maintains affiliations with the nearby Clark Art Institute and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), and has a close relationship with Exeter College, Oxford. The college competes in the NCAA Division III New England Small College Athletic Conference as the Ephs. Prominent alumni include 9 Pulitzer Prize winners, 2 Nobel Prize laureates, a Fields medalist, a Lasker award recipient, 16 billionaires, 71 members of the United States Congress, 22 United States Governors, 4 United States Cabinet secretaries, an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, a President of the United States, 3 prime ministers, CEOs and founders of Fortune 500 companies, multiple Emmy, Oscar, Tony, and Grammy award winners, and professional athletes. Other notable alumni include 40 Rhodes Scholars and 17 Marshall Scholarship recipients.
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Overview of institution
This, and the rest of the page, use info from the most recent year available, generally 2023.
Institution kind: Baccalaureate Colleges: Arts & Sciences Focus
Undergrad program: Arts & sciences focus, some graduate coexistence
Graduate program: Postbaccalaureate: Other-dominant, with Arts & Sciences
Enrollment profile: Very high undergraduate (see more details below)
Average net price for undergrads on financial aid: $20,965 (1.1 times the equivalent cost of Harvard).
Actual price for your family: Go here to see what your family may be asked to pay. It can be MUCH lower than the average price but also higher for some.
Size and setting: Four-year, small, highly residential
In state percentage: 14% of first year students come from Massachusetts
In US percentage: 91% of first year students come from the US
Graduation rate (within 6 years) for students seeking a Bachelors: 95.1% (this is what is usually reported as “graduation rate”)
Graduation rate (within 4 years) for students seeking a Bachelors: 87.9%
Percent of students seeking a Bachelors who transfer out of this institution: 0.9%
Student to tenure-stream faculty ratio: 8.6 (undergrads to tenure-stream faculty) [Tenure explained]
Student to faculty ratio: 7.0 (undergrads to all faculty)
Degrees offered: Bachelor’s degree, Master’s degree
Schedule: Four-one-four plan
Institution provides on campus housing: Yes
Dorm capacity: There are enough dorm beds for 2173 students
Freshmen required to live on campus: Yes
Advanced placement (AP) credits used: Implied no
Disabilities: 8.33 percent of undergrads are registered as having disabilities.
Map
Comparisons
The sections below show this institution compared with others. The ones listed are ones it has identified as peers, who consider themselves peers, and/or who the federal government considers peers. If a comparison school has the same value as the focal school, its cell is grayed out. Arrows show where there is a signficant trend over time for a school. You can swipe across the table to see more of it; the focal school column is always visible.
- Williams College lists these schools as ones to compare itself within federal IPEDS data, and they do the same back: Dartmouth College, Bowdoin College, Pomona College, Swarthmore College, Middlebury College, Wesleyan University, Grinnell College, Haverford College, Carleton College
- Williams College compares itself to these institutions, but not vice versa: Amherst College
- These institutions compare themselves to Williams College, but not vice versa: Barnard College, Colby College, Wellesley College, Claremont McKenna College, Davidson College, Hillsdale College, Hamilton College, Bates College, Colgate University, Washington and Lee University, Colorado College, Vassar College, Smith College, Harvey Mudd College, College of the Holy Cross, Macalester College, Lafayette College, Oberlin College, Trinity College, Mount Holyoke College, Kenyon College, Trinity University, Franklin and Marshall College, Connecticut College, St Olaf College, Reed College, Union College, Rhodes College, Bard College, Furman University, Sarah Lawrence College, Principia College, Centenary College of Louisiana
Enrollment
General
Teaching
Tenure track faculty are those who are eligible for tenure. This includes both pre-tenure and tenured faculty. Once faculty get tenure, they are (generally) protected from being fired for intellectual reasons, helping to ensure their freedom in teaching and research. They can still lose their positions for misconduct, financial problems, not fulfilling their duties, or other reasons.
Non-tenure track faculty are not eligible for tenure. Some are hired one semester at a time, some have multi-year contracts. They typically have a higher teaching load than tenure track faculty, leaving less time for research or other creative endeavors. They are also easier to fire than tenured faculty. Sometimes they are external experts (a noted musician, a former senator) who are hired to teach some classes without the expected permanence of a tenure-track position.
Note that this chart uses US federal demographic data: it only has two genders and a specified set of ethnicities and races.
Having a low student to faculty ratio is considered a good thing by many, as it can mean more individual attention.
Geography
This has information on the location of the institution. See the about page for more information on what the metrics are and how they are calculated. The goal is to neutrally provide information: for example, some individuals want stringent gun control in an area, some want the opposite: the categories are meant to be descriptive.
Financial Aid
Graduation
Note these are bachelors graduation rates in six years, not four (this is standard). Sample sizes can be small for some demographic groups with few individuals in a school, leading to large year-to-year fluctuations and often extreme values for those groups (if there are two individuals in the class with a given identity, the possible graduation rates are 0%, 50%, or 100% depending on whether zero, one, or both students graduate within six years).
Library
Libraries are changing rapidly. Note that how institutions count digital collections may vary.
Diversity
The US Census Bureau has a diversity index that goes from 0 to 1. In their words, “A 0-value indicates that everyone in the population has the same racial and ethnic characteristics. A value close to 1 indicates that everyone in the population has different racial and ethnic characteristics.” This uses their formula, but with the resolution available for the federal IPEDS data (which does not separate for a given demographic group whether members identify as Hispanic or not). This metric is about heterogeneity within the population, not the proportion of the population that comes from historically excluded groups.
Following the practice of the census, the index is multiplied by 100 to give the percentage probability a random pair of individuals will have a different background. Most institutions argue that diversity is a benefit, so by default a higher number is listed as better, but there may be cases where this measure does not reflect the mission of a college (for example, 70% of the students at a tribal college or university may be American Indian: that could be low-scoring by this metric but should not be read as “bad” given the institution’s mission).
These numbers are based on the most recent year available, generally 2023, which predates effects of the US Supreme Court’s striking down of affirmative action. This has often changed, sometimes dramatically, the incoming student demographics at some institutions.
Overall diversity
Freshman profile
Demographic data for first time degree-seeking students. Note that this uses US federal demographic data: it only has two genders and a specified set of ethnicities and races.
Freshman geography
Test scores
SAT scores
ACT scores
Majors
This presents information on the number of majors and the median earnings one and five years after graduation for people who got a degree from this institution in that field. The earnings are for those who are working and not enrolled in further education. The earnings data (from the federal college scorecard) also has information on earnings for those categorized as ‘MALE’ and ‘NOMALE’ – for readability, these are recategorized here as “Men” and “Women”, respectively, which adopts the gender binary used in other federal data. “W/M earnings ratio” is the median earnings of women divided by men, as a percentage.