)Williams college
曾有这样的说法：这个大学不是什么人都能去读的，1000个人想去读，500跟老师咨询，100申请，10面试，1个录取，虽有一些夸张，但其抢手度可见一斑。
曾有很多人认为美国最好的大学教育来自于哈佛或耶鲁大学。这种观念是很片面的。
在美国的高等教育中，学府分为两种。
综合大学（University）及翻译为文科学院的（Liberal&Art college）。
这两种大学本质的区别在于，综合大学拥有研究院。从研究院毕业的学生可拿到硕士学位。而文科学院只提供本科教育，其毕业生可获得学士学位。
因为只做本科教育，有很多方面认为，文科大学的本科教育是远远高于综合大学的。而Williams大学就是文科大学中排名第一位的佼佼者。
Williams大学位于美国东海岸，地处麻省Williams小镇。地理位置非常优渥。始建于1793年，环境与历史都非常迷人。其积极的教学氛围与宽松的学习环境都得到了很高的评价。Williams college 还有一个可爱的名字叫做Purple Bubble，叫“紫色的泡泡”是因为它美丽得如此不真实那真是美得很难形容的地方。
更难能可贵的是，在这个学府里基本不存在所谓种族歧视。这是一个绝对自由的艺术学习环境。Williams College甚至还做到招收学生一视同仁，对每个种族与肤色，有均衡比例的名额分配。那里对格式宗教信仰的尊重，更是让人敬佩的。
大多数人了解Williams college都是因为音乐人王力宏曾经在这所学府里渡过他的大学时光。他说:“因为我们的学校的校旗、球队的衣服……很多东西都是紫色的，所以我们也把Williams College叫作Purple Bubble，就是因为它实在美的像一个泡泡，它就像一个保护膜那样，在那个泡泡里面，包覆着我们每一个人，最珍贵的浪漫、梦想与希望……那真是我生命中最愉快的一段时光。”
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. Fraternities were phased out beginning in 1962. Coeducation was adopted in 1970. The school color is purple. The mascot is the Purple Cow. There are three academic divisions (humanities, sciences, social sciences), 24 departments, 33 majors, plus concentrations and special programs. The student:faculty ratio is 8:1. The academic year consists of two four-course semesters plus a one-course January term. 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: 315
Tenured faculty as a percentage of voting membership: 55%
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. 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 over the last two years averaged ,910,245 each year.
Outside grants and awards to support faculty research have included the American Chemical Society, Dreyfus Foundation, Ford Foundation, Fulbright Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Luce Foundation, W.M. Keck Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Mellon Fund, Merck, NASA, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, Research Corporation, 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 275 FTE
Support Staff 460 FTE
Students
Enrollment (Fall 2006)
Undergraduate Graduate
Total 2,124 46
Men 1,026 12
Women 1,098 34
Non-U.S. enrollment 6%
U.S. minority enrollment 29%
Class of 2010 Admission Statistics
Applied: 6,000
Admitted: 1,145
Percent admitted: 19%
Entered: 534
Early decision as percentage
of entering class: 36%
American students of color: 28%
Geographically, New York is the largest state represented, followed by Massachusetts and California.
2006-07 Comprehensive Fee
Tuition: ,478
Board, room, & fees: ,192
Total: ,650
Financial Aid
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.
Class of 2010 Financial Aid Statistics
Percent receiving Williams aid 44%
Average financial aid package (scholarship, job, loan) ,600
Range of awards ,150 - ,000
Range of family income of students assisted - 0,000
Major Fields of Study
The five-year average distribution of majors, 2002-06:
1795541652245551480703103562376911107071987263
American studies 17, Anthropology 9, Art 55, Asian studies 4, Astronomy 1, Astrophysics 6, Biology 52, Chemistry 24, Chinese 5, Classics 5, Comparative Literature 5, Computer Science 14, Economics 80, English 70, French 3, Geosciences 10, German 3, History 56, Japanese 2, Mathematics 37, Music 6, Philosophy 9, Physics 11, Political Economy 10, Political science 70, Psychology 71, Religion 9, Russian 8, Sociology 7, Spanish 2, Theatre 6, Women's Studies 3. (Note: Approximately 26 percent of students graduate as double majors.)
Completion Statistics
Of the 524 first-year students who entered in 1999, 92% graduated from Williams within four years and 96% within six years.
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Alumni
There are 26,000 living alumni of record, and 75 regional alumni associations nationwide and overseas. Alumni participation in the 2005-06 Alumni Fund was 61%. 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 2005-06 operating expenditures: 4,187,289
Gifts from private support: ,097,884
Endowment and investments:
(Market value as of 6/30/06) ,632,088,151
Campus
450-acre campus and 2,800 outlying acres, including the Hopkins Memorial Forest (2,500 acres). The college operates more than 100 academic, athletic, and residential buildings including the new '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 885,000 volumes in the Sawyer, Schow Science, and Matt Cole libraries and 50,000 in Chapin Rare Books Library; 13,500 paper and electronic periodical subscriptions; 492,000 microtexts; 30,000 sound recordings; 9,500 videos; 430,000 government documents; and 4,579 cubic feet of archival material. Services include reference assistance, user education, and automated access to the collection and more than 210 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 200,000 books, bound periodicals, and auction sales catalogues, with current journal subscriptions numbering around 680. Williams is also a member of the Boston Library Consortium, with online borrowing access to more than 21 million volumes, and is a founding member of the Nexpress consortium with similar access to over four million volumes.
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 time periods 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.
The museum also provides leadership for Kidspace, a collaborative project with MASS MoCA and the Clark, which provides a contemporary art gallery, studio space, and intensive education initiative that reaches every student and teacher in eight local elementary schools.
Information Technology
The Office for Information Technology provides computer services, equipment, and infrastructure to serve the academic and administrative needs of Williams 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, three media studios, 19 public computer labs and over 170 software packages. About 450 computers are replaced annually for faculty, staff, and labs. The email system delivers about 51,000 messages daily after rejecting about 750,000 for span 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.
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.
Career Counseling
The Office of Career Counseling exists to help students and recent graduates discover, create, and pursue extraordinary careers that will not only draw upon their talents, interests, and skills, but will also contribute to the community at large. The office 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, including advertising, publishing, entertainment, finance, consulting, journalism, the sciences, insurance, law, education and teaching, government, the arts, nonprofits, and more. In addition, the office schedules on-campus interviews for juniors and seniors with employers and graduate schools. Finally, it provides a comprehensive website with databases containing thousands of job and internship opportunities.
Summer programs on campus (Conference Office)
Williamstown Theatre Festival, Massachusetts Teachers Association, Massachusetts Trial Court Judges, NSF Chemistry Program, Council for the Advancement and Support of Education, Berkshire Institute for Music and Arts, Science Research Students' Programs, Williams Summer Science Program, Williams Humanities Pre-Enrollment Program, Williams College Undergraduate Research, Clark Art Institute Docents, Overland Student Travel, Putney Student Travel's Excel Program, Suzuki in the Berkshires, Nike Golf, U.S. Sports Tennis & Volleyball camps, and many other sports camps and alumni programs.
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
