You should decide for yourself. Some recent events of note, in our opinion:

• They’ve opened a new School of Computing, Data Sciences and Physics;
• Started an undergraduate marine science major at the newly established Batten* School of Coastal and Marine Sciences;
• Achieved Carnegie R1 status;
• Begun changing old Brown Hall into Gates Hall;
• They changed the name of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences for some reason;
• Women’s basketball went to the Big Dance for the very first time;
• And scholars unearthed more of the story of a colonial school for Black children

All of this (and more) got us ranked 51st nationally by U.S. News and World Report. You’ll have to scroll down in that last one — they really tried to bury the number. 

*Honorary alumna — and this year’s Homecoming Grand Marshal — Jane Batten L.H.D. ’19 was also recognized this year by another university down the road in Virginia Beach, which will also soon bear her name.

Calling William & Mary a “public research university” does nothing to set us apart. We want to see W&M stand alone and proud in the higher-education marketplace and in the hearts and minds of its community. In a thick forest of conformity, let’s re-emphasize our strengths and uniqueness. The nerve and talent are already here.

Prestige is a slippery thing; so is “preeminence.” William & Mary stopped using “College” to refer to itself sometime in 2014, when we were ranked 32nd by U.S. News and World Report¹. After 11 years of “university” (and two major changes in their methodology) we’re 51st. How does prestige look to Boston (College), at 37th, or Dartmouth (College) at 15th? Is “College” holding them back?

*Of the top 100 institutions on the national list, only three don’t have the word “college,” “university” or “institute” in the listed name: William & Mary, Virginia Tech (both #51) and the Colorado School of Mines (#80).

We don’t, at least not exactly. We use U.S. News rankings here as a third-party proxy for broader questions about quality and parity, but we recognize they are not perfect, as no single measure can be. In any case, the W&M administration is still worried about them. Click here for some more detailed discussion on U.S. News rankings: why they’re flawed, why they shouldn’t matter, and why you should care anyway.

In international contexts, this is true; it’s also one of the reasons W&M has used to justify using “university” and not “College.” Of course, anyone who won’t bother to learn that W&M is a university that calls itself a College for truly important reasons isn’t someone we really need on campus. For what it’s worth, 2024’s new freshman class (before the present turmoil, to be fair) was 3% international students; in 2014, it was 8%. If “university” was meant to draw more international students, it wasn’t working in 2024 and it’s definitely not moving the needle now.

Not really. In 2014, the College of William & Mary’s School of Education graduate program was ranked 39th; today they’re 49th. William & Mary Law was 24th and is today 30th. On the brighter side, Mason’s MBA program was 82nd as per USNWR in 2014 and today is No. 61. That’s after 11 years of saying almost nothing but “university.” Again: rankings are imperfect, but they do matter.

As international enrollment goes, it’s not as clear. In 2014, 40% of the entering Mason School of Business MBA class came from abroad and 38 international students came for William & Mary Law’s LLM program. In 2024 (again, before the present turmoil), neither school seems to have published numbers of any kind.

Nope.

Give money where it matters most; it’s not for us to tell you where to donate. But small donors cannot have the transformative power of billionaires to change the College unless we have a single voice. We have to speak together about what matters. If you do choose to make a gift to W&M, make it clear that our identity as “The College” matters to you (put it in your Gift Details). Don’t let them forget what makes us special. Read more here.

Absolutely not. There are many more important things for W&M leadership to focus on and guard against; many of the gains they’ve engineered have been truly impressive. The higher-ed landscape has become a treacherous place, and W&M already knows what being a proxy war in a larger conflict feels like. We just hope to get their attention and help them correct course. This is how you can help.

You can’t. At least not physically. You can reach us at editor@thegale.org or join our Discord channel to continue the discussion, though.

This isn’t about anyone taking credit, or the distractions that come with personal politics. This is about preserving what’s important about our alma mater.

The Gale is like Batman: waiting in the shadows for a signal to take action. This summer, we came into being in response to the renaming of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences to the College of Arts & Sciences and drove responses to the alumni survey. We’re back for a few days at Homecoming, and you’ll likely hear from us again around Charter Day — unless the College needs us in between.