About The College of William and Mary

The College of William & Mary (also known as William & Mary, W&M, and officially The College of William and Mary in Virginia) is a public research college circles in Williamsburg, Virginia. Founded in 1693 by letters patent issued by King William III and Queen Mary II, it is the second-oldest institution of well ahead education in the United States, after Harvard University.

William & Mary educated American presidents Thomas Jefferson (third), James Monroe (fifth), and John Tyler (tenth), as competently as further key figures pivotal to the increase of the United States, including the first President of the Continental Congress Peyton Randolph of Virginia, the first U.S. Attorney General Edmund Randolph of Virginia, the fourth U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall of Virginia, Speaker of the House of Representatives Henry Clay of Kentucky, sixteen members of the Continental Congress, and four signers of the Declaration of Independence, earning it the nickname “the Alma Mater of the Nation.” A teen George Washington also established his surveyor’s license at the assistant professor in 1749, and he would become the college’s first American chancellor in 1788.

William & Mary is notable for its many firsts in American innovative education. The F.H.C. Society, founded in 1750, was the first collegiate fraternity in the United States, and W&M students founded the Phi Beta Kappa academic honor society in 1776, the first Greek-letter fraternity. W&M was then the first scholastic of well ahead education in the United States to install an tribute code of conduct for students, dating back to 1736. The creation of graduate programs in play-act and medicine in 1779 makes it one of the first universities in the United States. The Marshall–Wythe School of Law is the oldest law learned in the United States, and the Sir Christopher Wren Building is the oldest academic building in continuous use in the United States.

In accessory to its undergraduate program, W&M is house to several graduate programs and four professional schools. In his 1985 scrap book Public Ivies: A Guide to America’s Best Public Undergraduate Colleges and Universities, Richard Moll included William & Mary as one of the native eight “Public Ivies”. It is classified among “R2: Doctoral Universities – High Research Activity”.

Williamsburg is a city in the U.S. state of Virginia. As of the 2010 U.S. Census, the population was 14,068. In 2019, the population was estimated at 14,954. Located upon the Virginia Peninsula, Williamsburg is in the northern allocation of the Hampton Roads metropolitan area. It is bordered by James City County and York County.

Williamsburg was founded in 1632 as Middle Plantation, a fortified settlement upon high ground amid the James and York rivers. The city was the capital of the Colony and Commonwealth of Virginia from 1699 to 1780 and the center of political goings-on in Virginia leading to the American Revolution. The College of William & Mary, established in 1693, is the second-oldest institution of sophisticated education in the United States and the on your own one of the nine colonial colleges in the South; its alumni count up three U.S. presidents as with ease as many additional important figures in the nation’s forward history.

The city’s tourism-based economy is driven by Colonial Williamsburg, the city’s restored Historic Area. Along with easily reached Jamestown and Yorktown, Williamsburg forms share of the Historic Triangle, which annually attracts higher than four million tourists. Modern Williamsburg is next a learned town, inhabited in large part by William & Mary students, faculty and staff.