To all the new members of the Tribe, welcome. You’ve made an excellent choice. We here at the Gale are immensely proud of our College, we are intensely hopeful for its future, and we’re glad you’re here.

Around these parts, we’re trying to ensure that the W&M you grow to love remains unique and cherished. We believe our historic core of close community and liberal arts education is paramount, even if Forbes thinks our 333-year-old institution is suddenly about career preparedness¹ and the W&M administration can’t stop trying to make “preeminence” happen.² “College” is at the very soul of the place.

In the spirit of this intimacy and collaboration, we used to call W&M “The College.” W&M abandoned that name for dubious reasons a little over a decade ago, using historical nitpicks, in pursuit of international students and supposedly clearer branding and identity.

But in 2024, the incoming freshman Class of 2028 was made up of 3% international students. A decade earlier, when W&M was still calling itself “The College,” the incoming class of 2018 was 8% international. Today’s class of 2030 is 2% international.

On another note, we wrote last fall about our falling U.S. News ranking, and we’ll cover the 2026 numbers when they’re released.

There are many things happening globally that influence these dropping numbers; but we don’t think rebranding W&M to “university” left and right is helping. Of course, we know W&M is a full-fledged university in practice — it’s America’s first one, after all — but “College” says more of the right things about who we are. “College” says more about our strengths. “University” does not.

So, to our new friends and colleagues as you settle into the academic year, we ask a simple thing: don’t let our College become just another university. Welcome home, and go Tribe.

1. In this article, Forbes calls W&M a “New Ivy,” which sounds a lot like the “public Ivy” term that W&M has been using for decades. Here’s a reminder that the Ivy League is an athletic conference, not a hall of fame. ↩︎
2. We previously dove into this with this post. ↩︎