News & World Report's rankings of National Liberal Arts Colleges every year since 2004, and the college has held high-ranking positions in other institutional rankings. Williams is a highly selective school with an acceptance rate of 8% for the Class of 2025. The athletic program has been highly successful, as Williams College has won 22 of the last 24 College Directors' Cups for NCAA Division III. The college competes in the NCAA Division III New England Small College Athletic Conference as the Ephs. The college maintains affiliations with the nearby Clark Art Institute and Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, and has a close relationship with Exeter College, Oxford University. Williams offers an almost entirely undergraduate instruction, though there are two graduate programs in development economics and art history. įollowing 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. As of 2021, the school has an enrollment of 1,962 undergraduate students and 25 graduate students. There are 319 voting faculty members, with a student-to-faculty ratio of 6:1. 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. It became officially coeducational in the 1960s. It positioned itself as a "Western counterpart" to Yale and Harvard. It is the second-oldest institution of higher education in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts after Harvard College.Īlthough the bequest from the estate of Ephraim Williams intended to establish a "free school", the exact meaning of which is ambiguous, the college quickly outgrew its initial ambitions. 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 College is a private liberal arts college in Williamstown, Massachusetts.