I’m strongly considering attending, but I wanted to know what all you guys like and dislike about the College.
Any input would be appreciated! I’m torn between three college, and all would be good options.
Pros are definitely its reputation, strong teacher-student relationships and a beautiful campus. The only con: The senior student who interviewed our daughter said that while there’s a lot of school pride, the pride doesn’t often translate into school spirit. It depends on how important that is to you. Our daughter loves W&M but will attend UVA largely because of that reason.
Also, are there any groups right now for admitted students?
Pros: William and Mary puts as much focus on undergraduate education as any public university in the country. It is residential (which greatly enhances the educational experience), professors care about teaching, care about students, and are accessible. Students are smart, earnest, and friendly in general. The campus and environs are beautiful and unique. There is a discernible sense of community&M alumni give back to the school at a rate higher than any other national, public university.
Cons: If you want a large school, an urban experience, or a big time sports environment, W&M is not for you.
Pros: It has an extremely strong community. People are extremely passionate, friendly, and down-to-earth. You will find people here that really care about things and go the extra mile. Many exceptional professors have shaped my time here and will take the time to get to know you, while roping you into cool opportunities like research. The campus is beautiful and has lots of history and cool alumni.
There is always something going on around campus and freshman dorms are really tight-knit. It is strong in almost every subject and has a curriculum really focused on interdisciplinary and international study. It is the place where you will definitely find intellectual conversation as well as those 2 AM converstaions with your neighbors.
It is a place that is generally very accepting of students and where you can really be yourself. It is exactly the right size: you can walk around campus and always see a friendly face, but also large enough that you are constantly meeting new people. There is something for everyone whether it be the outdoors club, the international relations club, to heck even the cheese club and the blacksmithing club (yes they exist).
The repuatation of the school is strong and it has many connections, especially in the D.C. area. It is public university, which means it is great if you are in-state. Students are generally collaborative rather than competitive and there is a strong culture of looking out for one another. You will also be challenged in many different ways and grow immensely as a person. You really have the ability to make your education your own with the ability to design your own major, the many study abroad opportunities, and opportunities to become a leader in some form.
Cons: The area does not get lots of snow, which is something I missed being from up North. Parking spaces are limited, so you won’t be able to have a car on campus until you are an upperclassman. Food is alright, but nothing spectacular. There is a strong on campus community, but Williamsburg is not your typical city in terms of being a traditional college town. Because it is a public school, you may not get as much geographic diversity as let’s say a private university. And it is one of those places where you will want to be comfortable being one of many shining stars, because people will definitely challenge and push you to become better than where you first started.
@exoheat11 Yes. I believe the “William & Mary Class of 2021” page is up.
As someone who transferred to W&M after a year in a college in a big city and after graduation took classes here and there at a variety of well-regarded universities for professional development, I think I can offer some useful advice. In fact, I joined this site just to give the advice I would give my own brothers as I happened to be considering that exact question when I found this thread.
Most of the pros and cons that people give for W&M do not ring true to me (most of the given pros could have come from the college’s own About section – never a good sign as far as veracity goes. Most of the cons are just gripes about college in general).
W&M is a very good choice for college, but if you are selecting between W&M and UVa, or Wake Forest, or Georgetown, or Yale, or a small liberal arts school, you need to have some meaningful way of making a choice. On some of the W&M clichés: W&M is neither a brutal or a breezy academic environment – you could skip a lot of classes, do your work the night before and graduate with a B average, or you could brown-nose within an inch of your life, repeat what the professors want to hear, and get a 4.0, without doing any intellectual heavy-lifting. People aren’t exceptionally friendly, talented, or unique, on the whole – just regular college students, some there just to study, some there just to party. Professors don’t take special concern for their students relative to many other schools – actually I’d say on the whole they were the least caring of the school I’ve been to, in part because they are openly angry about their pay and the intellectual quality of their students – but a few rare professors at W&M really do live up to the hype. The community is not distant or especially tight nit. In most ways, W&M is like any other college you might attend, and the people are like those at any other college that ranks in the top 75 or so.
If you have choices among similarly ranked or more highly ranked schools and all else is equal (you got into an honors program in all or none of them and financial aid and cost is about the same), you might choose W&M because you love the idea of going to school in, basically, Colonial Williamsburg, with all the atmosphere and historical resources that entails. This is a legitimate reason, especially if you are looking to study history. You might choose it because you think it is less douchy than the other options (like say UVa or Duke). This is not a very good reason – entitled students abound and the fraternity scene at W&M is much more intense than it has the reputation of being. It is actually pretty huge and there have been a lot of problems with alcohol, drugs, and rape. If you think you can skip the UVa frat scene by going to W&M, I doubt you will succeed. As I recall, freshman girls went through the same rituals as UVa freshman girls as described in the infamous Rolling Stone article from 2014. One frat had mugs made up that included “the three pillars of frat”: breaking things, getting black-out wasted, and f-ing b-ches. If that sounds bad enough, it’s the same on the sorority end – one sorority had black shirts printed up that read “blackout squad.” They wore them often and lived up to them. A lot of these same people were involved in college Christian associations, so everything bleeds together.
If you like the idea of the Honor Code or Phi Beta Kappa being originated at W&M, neither is a good reason. The Honor Code has some interesting ramifications. As at any college, cheating is common and rarely detected. Unlike other colleges, some students, I suppose they are mostly on an honor code council, look at catching their fellow students much the same way that police view their daily quota. You’ll see such peer policers hovering around the computer labs looking for signs of honor code violations to report. They never bothered me, as I never cheated or did anything that looked like it, but I felt like they were despicable tools all the same. I guess it should be obvious that my opinion of W&M is slightly negative – it reminded me more of high school than any other university I’ve ever attended or visited.
The best way to select W&M or another college is to look at the quality of the faculty in the subjects you are interested in, look at the campus living situations, special academic or career opportunities, and odds of getting into the grad school or career you want. College decisions should be transactional. It’s like buying a house, getting married, or deciding what grocery store to shop at and what to buy. Forget about the mystique or horror some try to paint about W&M. It’s about what you are going to get out of it (and that has a lot to do with what you are going to be inspired to put in). If you do wind up at W&M, feel lucky, but don’t go in with blinders on.
I would strongly advise those considering colleges to see if Coursera or HarvardX has courses from schools of interest to get a taste of what the better professors will be like. Like I said, I attended W&M for 3 years, and have a graduate degree from an ivy league school, as well as experience taking classes here and there at whatever decent school has been local. By visiting campuses and exploring on your own without a tour guide (who will feed you as much propaganda as meaningful info), trying to sit in on classes unannounced it you can wing it, and watching unedited recorded lectures available for free online, you can get a strong feel about a college – how the student body feels and behaves, how the professors approach their jobs, and the general school vibe.
If you can do all that and W&M still looks great to you, you will probably be one of many that absolutely adore it.
“Professors don’t take special concern for their students relative to many other schools”
Well, if you look a Niche, they have student survey results where they ask this question (Are Profs passionate about what they teach? Do Profs care about student success? Are Profs approachable and helpful? Are Profs easy to engage and understand? Do Profs put a lot of effort into teaching?) If you look at the results and compare W&M to UVA, UNC, Michigan, Berkeley, and UCLA, you can see that W&M tops all of those schools in every question (there is a tie with UNC on how passionate professors are).
So, that is just one site, but it is significant.
Niche isn’t the only place that indicates that W&M professors are among the best teachers in the US. For a very long time US News and World Report (either that or Princeton Review) ranked W&M the 4th best school in the country for undergraduate teaching (W&M has just recently slid about 10 spots in this category). Teaching supposedly on par with Princeton and Brown is a widely touted point about W&M, which is why I brought it up. When I went to W&M, the college president often opined during speeches that W&M had the best professors dedicated to teaching in the US. I don’t remember that anyone ever called his bluff. It has always been a deep and inscrutable mystery to me how anyone could come to the logical, thought-out conclusion that W&M has somehow managed to magically select for teachers that are so good at teaching, especially as W&M has a relatively small endowment and budget. I have no clue when this talking point evolved (that’s all it is), but I suspect W&M created it because it was one of the only ways it could argue it is competitive with elite schools.
I don’t recall what the US News methodology was, but I remember it was not very scientific. I suspect that the absurd Niche score is based on student bias – if a school constantly, over decades, touts itself as having a specific superlative quality, then students will be more likely to think it true and parrot it. Students are even more likely to have that engrained belief if they only attended W&M or attended W&M and a very bad college.
I understand that the art of persuasion and repetition is so strong that if you hand someone a chocolate flavored ice-cream and tell them that it is strawberry enough and with utter conviction, then they will actually experience it as strawberry ice-cream. There are hundreds of millions of people around the world who believe that their country is the greatest, their school is the best, their faith the truest, etc. And they generally believe it for one reason – it has been beaten into them. W&M beats its talking points into students like no other college I know of, aside from the big Christian colleges like Liberty.
But my experience is just one person’s. I know most of my friends at W&M seemed to agree, but who knows what they really think. I took more classes at W&M than at any other school, and had maybe 1 professor who really seemed to give a rat’s a**. And he was also my advisor – and he also wasn’t a top scholar in his field (sorry, I still love you man). In graduate school, I had 11 out of 13 professors who were exceptional (and one who was W&M style… I dropped her class). All of the teachers I had in the various classes I took for professional development at other schools were better than W&M.
It’s good for W&M if people believe it has exceptional teachers – I’m sure people have opted for W&M over UVa or even better schools over this talking point – but it would be a disservice to any potential W&M student reading this thread to let that BS claim stand unchallenged.
@Farquhar You are certainly right that your experience is just that of one person. Niche is based on surveys from many students. If you want to claim that the survey is biased because they are all in essence indoctrinated, you are free to do that. I just don’t see much basis in fact because I don’t know of any schools/alumni/etc that don’t make claims.
Looking at Niche survey results, I see that institutions that are large and/or have more focus on research and graduate study tend to score lower on average on the measures of teaching quality and commitment. William and Mary, which is kind of between a LAC and research university fits into that spectrum (perhaps closer to the LAC side).
I have experience with UVA, W&M, Washington and Lee, and the University of Texas. If I had to rank them on the Niche teaching questions, there is no doubt in my mind it would go, highest to lowest, W&L, W&M, UVA, and UTA. That is the way they show up in Niche, and it aligns with the spectrum I described above. (Research universities certainly have other positive attributes, but that is another subject.)
You cite graduate school experience. Keep in mind that at research universities, the rough expectation is that professors spend 50% of time on research, 25% on graduate, and 25% on undergraduates. Since undergraduates typically outnumber graduate students, this means much more time is spent on a per student basis on graduate students.
Anyway, your viewpoint is valid. I just think you were a bit quick to dismiss a broader survey.
Good points. Someone just looking at Niche and my post would obviously be silly to put too much weight on the views of one person who liked W&M (it has tremendous atmosphere) but felt that he had made a mistake in putting too much weight on its talking points when considering attending. Your view point is particularly worthwhile since you have experience at several highly-regarded schools often considered to be in the same sort of rank as W&M.
But dissenting voices are important and – for me anyway in trying to make sense of the disconnect between my experience and the Niche survey results and US News ranking – I find the argument that students have a response bias from constantly hearing that W&M is one of the top 4 schools in the country for undergraduate teaching compelling. It’s either that or W&M really does have superior undergraduate teaching, which I personally cannot believe. I may have been in the wrong departments though, so I would advise anyone to look carefully at the department they are interested in majoring in.
On comparing W&M to other schools I attended:
I took one course while a graduate student at Harvard that was mostly for undergraduates (Harvard College and the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences have the same course catalog and courses are divided into three groups, mostly undergraduate, a mix, and mostly graduate, some of which are all graduate, obviously. You can enroll in virtually any class you want at the university as a graduate student if you can argue that it supports your graduate degree). This was actually the best course I ever took as far as teaching. It had two of the top scholars in the field as professors and a couple TAs who either had PhDs or were working on them. This course had as many students as the biggest classes I ever took at W&M. And I had more personal attention from the main professor than in any other class I ever took. I don’t think I got special attention.
Then I look at the rankings in US News and World Report and see W&M killing Harvard in rankings of best undergraduate teaching. One of the talking points I think I’ve heard that applies here is that schools like Harvard use TAs and W&M rarely does. But when the TAs are as good as the average W&M professor and the main Harvard professor is just as helpful if not more so than a W&M one, I can only see the TA system as a perk.
Granted that was one Harvard class mostly populated by college students, but what are the odds that the only class I selected just happened to be an outlier, and that I managed to take classes with some 30 professors at W&M and only one was pretty great as a teacher, and none were world-class scholars? W&M professors usually have excellent degrees and publish not infrequently, but it’s very rare for one of them to be near the top of her field as a thinker or writer.
I’d also say that most of the classes I took at W&M were very small (a pro). On average the graduate courses I took had maybe 12 students though one had more than 100 and was outrageously excellent as far as teaching and attention went. It was even catered. The average difference in class size between my courses at W&M and Harvard was marginal. If I remember correctly, my average W&M class had 15 to 30 students in it.
The other schools I took classes at were further back than W&M in the top 100 national universities. It did seem like they might be less consistent as far as teacher quality goes. As someone attending for just a year or just enrolling in a class here and there I may have cherry-picked great teachers in a way I couldn’t at W&M.
I’ve probably posted too much here, but I just think this is an important topic. I might not have gone to W&M if hadn’t believed I was about to be enriched by some of the best teaching in the US. But again, W&M is a solid credential. I think it is on the whole as good as UVa, just scaled way down to liberal arts college size and with less money. However, I don’t think most people consider W&M to be quite as good as UVa when they size you up. If you must go in-state to a public school, this whole conversation is less meaningful. W&M is an excellent option in that common scenario.
Well, we’re getting off the original topic. My perception is that undergraduate teaching quality is not a major focus at national research universities. While tuition has skyrocketed, spending on actual instruction is pretty much flat. The money has gone toward administration growth, institutionally funded research, and other things not related to undergraduate teaching. Institutions work to produce metrics that indicate a focus on instruction (classes under 20, spending, student faculty ratios, etc.), but these are heavily manipulated. In reality, teaching load has shifted from tenure track to adjuncts, non-tenure, and TAs. Career success, both for faculty and TAs is more dependent on research than on teaching. Revenue from humanities is used to heavily subsidize STEM. Undergraduate advising can be spotty. Institutional success is viewed as linked to research, halo programs, and ratings.