William & Mary end-of-year report
President Taylor Reveley sent the following message to the William & Mary community on June 18, 2014. - Ed.
Dear Friends,
I’ve met William & Mary people from coast to coast during 2013-14 and shared with them news of the university. The news is splendid.
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Among the roughly 4,500 institutions of higher education in the United States, U.S. News & World Report ranks William & Mary third in the country behind only Dartmouth and Princeton for commitment to undergraduate education. To ensure close engagement of our students with their professors, and despite the cost, we have maintained the best student-faculty ratio of any public university in the United States.
For the 10th year in a row, William & Mary saw a record-breaking number of undergraduate applicants - more than 14,500. Once on campus, our students thrive, with a 91 percent graduation rate.
Only one other university, public or private, had more Fulbright awards per student last year than William & Mary. As our Reves Center for International Studies celebrates its 25th anniversary, it is fitting that William & Mary stands first among public universities for the percentage of undergraduates (almost 50 percent) studying abroad.
Although a fragile, indeed gossamer, empirical basis undergirds most of the rankings that exist in rabbit-like profusion these days, I like the sentiment of those that ranked our students the smartest in the country among public schools and our professors in the top four among all schools, public and private.
Almost 100 varsity athletes graduated in the Class of 2014. They won 15 Colonial Athletic Association championships during the past four years and earned degrees in 22 different disciplines. Thirty-three of them received All-Conference honors during their careers, and 29 were inducted into the national honor society for college athletes. Thirty of them earned Provost Awards this past year for achieving a cumulative grade-point average over 3.5 at William & Mary.
According to U.S. News & World Report rankings of the nation’s leading universities, William & Mary has the largest gap (82 points) between quality and the resources to sustain it. No other school comes close to that imbalance. Still, we keep making every reasonable effort to do more with less, including a business innovation initiative launched this year that is reviewing all our business processes.
Our philanthropic progress continues. It resulted in more than $104 million raised during the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2013. This was the most ever contributed to William & Mary in a single year. It bodes well for the future that 90 percent of the third-year law students in the Class of 2014 and 70 percent of the undergraduate seniors made a gift to William & Mary.
In every respect, the Alma Mater of the Nation is rolling, most of all in the extraordinary force of the teaching, research and learning that takes place every year within our precincts. The academic excellence of William & Mary, honed over more than three centuries, is stunning.
If you have not yet cast a vote for William & Mary this fiscal year via annual giving, the gong will not ring until June 30th. Time remains. Here’s a link to a website to do the deed: www.wm.edu/giving and a link to a video that will warm your hearts: video
W. Taylor Reveley, III