Williams College

Overview

Williams College

Williams College is a private liberal college in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Its history dates as far back as 1790 when West College, a free school, was founded. In 1793, the free school was closed to make way for Williams College, which started as a men’s-only institution. Upon its establishment, Williams College became one of the oldest institutions of higher education in Massachusetts along with Harvard College.

Williams College Key Statistics

The school’s educational structure comprises three academic divisions—social sciences, languages and the arts, and science and mathematics. Under these divisions are 25 departments that encompass more than 60 areas of study, including 36 majors. Instead of academic minors, William College offers 12 concentrations or courses that students can choose from based on their interests or as supplemental programs to their majors. In addition, Williams College also has several special programs along with an off-campus experience-based education.

The institution has an average enrollment of 2,000 students. It also has approximately 2,250 employees, which include 364 faculty members. Among the members of the faculty, 95% have a doctorate and other terminal degrees. The college population occupies the 450-acre Williamstown campus that houses more than 100 buildings and facilities for academic and athletic activities.

Other Williams College key statistics include its housing facilities for students and 111 units for the college staff and faculty members. Furthermore, the college has five libraries, namely the Sawyer Library, New Sawyer Library, Schow Science Library, Human Library Project, and the Chapin Library of Rare Books that holds special collections of antique books and manuscripts.

Williams College Research

Students at Williams College carry out original research. With strong funding support from the institution’s substantial $2.84 billion endowments, the researchers have gained considerable recognition for their works. The top fields of Williams College research are computer science, mathematics, economics.

Its research outputs have been published in prestigious journals like the Social Science Research Network, Research Papers in Economics, and The Association for Computational Linguistics. Its researchers have attended major scholarly conferences such as the Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Networked Systems Design and Implementation, and Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education.

The most cited Williams College research publication is the “Entanglement of formation of an arbitrary state of two qubits” by Wooters. This was published in 1998 in the Physical Review Letters and has since earned 10,284 citations.

The college’s second most cited publication is the “Mixed state entanglement and quantum error correction” by Bennett et al., which has been cited 6,726 times since it was published in the Physical Review A in 1996.

Moreover, the university’s third most cited publication is the “Moses: Open source toolkit for statistical machine translation” by Koehn et al. Published in the 2007 Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics proceedings, this research has 6,230 citations, thus far.

In addition, the university is home to several notable names in various fields, such as the chair of the Federal Trade Commission and legal scholar Lina M. Khan. C.N.N. news anchor Erin Burnett, and Chase Coleman III, founder of Tiger Global Management.

You can also learn more about the educational performance of Williams College in our ranking of US universities & colleges.