Williams, Swarthmore others?

This is one of the more absurd attack jobs on Williams. That is an absolutely picturesque campus. They are building a new indoor track right now. They are building new athletic facilities now after building new facilities both in the 1990s and in the past fifteen years. They had a genuinely old track up to the late 1980s (500y or so, dirt), then George Steinbrenner paid for a new rubberized track. That one was later removed in the 2000s or 2010s so that the football stadium no longer has a track around it and they put a new stand-alone facility beyond. That track surface is itself wearing a little bit now but it is being cleaned now. I am no fan of the new buildings they have put up on campus, because they don't fit with the old architecture at all, but you can study in the newish library with absolutely fantastic views of the mountain. They have all kinds of new facilities, science, library, dining hall/student union, athletic facilities, boathouse, etc. And what you didn't reply to was that they win the all-sport, all-college/all-university athletics rankings almost every year.

Also, Spring St. is tiny, no question about it, about two or three blocks long, but it does have eight restaurants, Pappa Charlie's, a breakfast/sandwich place, the Log, Blue Sapphire, a Mexican place, a mediterranean place, Crust (pizza), the Purple Pub, and then a cafe at the base across from an ice cream place, not to mention the movie theater, post office, bank, two bookstores, etc. There's more between there and North Adams but the advantage of just having that there is that the town is extremely peaceful and you don't have cars racing around the campus. The gym, by the way, doesn't have creaky doors. They have the classic beautiful old gym at the corner of Spring Street, but then they have all kinds of facilities that are new or up to date next to that--multiple weight rooms, exercise rooms, basketball courts, a very nice swimming facility where they've held D3 Nationals, etc. For a place with 2,000 students, the facilities are fantastic actually. In J-term they have a shuttle bus to their ski area every day and there's xc skiing nearby in Vermont. It's pretty much a paradise as colleges go and I have visited many, many colleges and universities.

Williams is obviously an elite academic institution, and yes it does have nice views of the hills, but however you gloss over it, there is a massive disconnect between the size of its endowment and its facilities. Its facilities are fine for a small liberal arts college that barely breaks even year to year, but not fine for a college with a 5 billion dollar endowment that is the same size as UC Berkeley and the University of Florida combined. The local county just finished a rec center up the road from me and it is nicer than the facilities at Williams. That said, it does win the D3 Director's Cup and clearly there is a sub-current of sports there, but it could be so much more. Why not really boost the facilities and bridge the gap to D1 even more? Why do sports fall off a cliff from elite academic D1 to elite academic D3? And I don't mean talent wise, I mean support and facilities wise. If Wake Forest was in D3 it would be the perfect example of meeting in the middle.

"Williams College has had by far the most success in Division III, having won the (Director's) Cup 22 of the 27 times it has been awarded for that division. The only other D-III member with more than one Cup is 2023 and 2024 winner Johns Hopkins."

Most of their facilities are new within the past fifteen years, so I don't see at all what you're complaining about.

Also, if you've ever been to UC Berkeley, the track facility, Edwards Stadium, opened in 1932. It has not exactly been constantly updated.

Complaining that a D3 school with 2,000 students doesn't have the athletic facilities of the University of Florida is rich. UF is a D1 state flagship school with 55,000 students (35k undergraduate) that plays in an 89,000 seat stadium in the SEC and had football revenues of $101 million last year.

assume Williams or Amherst have 2 slots each for admits. What does that mean in terms of “allowable” deviation from standard admit academic/test score profile? Can they recruit a 9/4:10 with 1250 SATs? Assume TO is still real at these schools, but believe athletic recruits are still required to provide scores

I went through it and was very low 9:0x. I don’t think there is anyway a 1250 is cutting it. Mine was well above 1500. The academic pre reads at those schools are no joke no matter how fast you are.

where did you land

Ended up going D1 but it was a tough choice. Really liked one of the D3s.

445/1030 does not get a special push anywhere, much less williams. you'd need to be an immediate conference points type runner. not sure how we even got onto that tangent other than these schools prompt kids to look for an admissions edge.

his leverage is the opposite. they give you a full ride with a 1570 at a lower ranked school and if they have any roster limits you magically make them. some cost conscious kids make that trade off. but most people want the better school and he'd have to drop down a few dozen ranking slots to use this leverage. i had some weak academic NAIA/d2s make that type offer, big academic scholarship with some sports money to top it off. i passed. you're still going to x when you could have gotten in y.

to me he's not looking for help, he's not getting any unless he slums, he's parsing among similar academic programs with different approaches to sports and rostering. without lowering his or their academic standards, one school lets him run, another doesn't. you pick among the ones that take you for both. and he should still take his shot at the limits ones. but if a school down the street with similar academics will say yes don't take any nos as definitive.

Man you really keep at this. You may just not know the Northeast. If Williams put up a 30,000 seat stadium, and a 10,000 seat Cameron Court...crickets ! No one would come.

There is just no demand for big time D1 sports in New England, and much of mid Atlantic. Particularly in Williamstown with 0 population within 90 minutes.

You have Syracuse, Boston College, Penn State. That's basically it. Then schools like Pitt, Maryland, Temple, Rutgers, Villanova, Providence, UConn, UMass all fighting for their lives in the new reality of revenue sharing.

When P4 leaves the NCAA in 2032, these schools will be left in NCAA.

There just is not a big fan base for schools like this.

Also the more academic a school is, the less fan support for sports. Except for Harvard/Yale, or Amherst/Williams, football games are empty...but the library is full. LOL. The geeks only attend sports, if a dorm mate is on the team, or it's a HUGE game; enough to be a thing.

Endowment? Even D1 powers like Texas or Michigan are not using their endowments to build facilities. They do separate capital campaigns.

Williams endowment really has little to do with sports. It has to do with longevity and compound interest. Williams was founded in 1793. Even with frugal alumni, 100-150 extra years of compounding equates to an extra $billion for a small school endowment.

The schools that can really benefit from your idea are already D1. UConn, UMass, Rutgers, Villanova, Maryland. What could these schools do to actually survive the next round of P4 cuts? What can they do to recruit better athletes? How can they fill their stadiums?

Or will some decide just to focus on academics and move down to D3.

I think they will find you. My brother was at Williams. The Swarthmore coaches drove to my house collected my essays and ensured my parents everything was paid for (they were immigrants). I was committed but then at the finale hour got a full ride to a P5 school D1 and felt horrible for that email.

Keep training hard/ my choice was a great one. I would have been a 20-time AA at Swarthmore and only ended up being a 2 x XC qualifier D1 with no AA honors.

Couldn't go wrong with any of these schools. I transferred from Duke to Haverford in the early 80s and loved Haverford so much. I was barely top 7 at Haverford but running for Tom Donnelly was a joy. In the early 2000s I had a post-doc at Williams and taught there for a year. It was a great place to spend a year, but I kept feeling like there must be more to the school that I wasn't seeing. All facilities (academic and athletic) were sub-par at that time (I went to Middlebury after that and the facilities were first class). For me (and my wife) the biggest problem with Williams was how isolated it was and how dark the winter was, there in the shadow of Mount Greylock. But of the 3 schools you mention it and Swarthmore are probably the best academically. But don't sleep on Haverford. Has lost some luster over the years as schools like Middlebury, Colby, and others have risen, but it is a super special place.

Nice story, unfortunately no coach is looking hard to find a 4:45 boy miler in 2025.

I hope your D1 school also gave you a great academic experience to go with the 2x XC nats!

There seems to be a lack of understanding/context of just how big a 5 billion dollar endowment is for a school of 2,000 students. This is an endowment that is bigger than the U Mass system, Arizona State and the University of Oregon combined. No one is saying they need to have facilities like SEC schools, or even the aforementioned schools, but just a minimal re-focus of a small percentage of their endowment towards facilities would rejuvenate the place. Maybe if there were permanent bleachers to sit on, fans would actually show up and watch events. Maybe if the facilities supported athletes beyond their prep school experience better athletes would want to come and a sports culture could be built. There is minimal research at Williams, no substantial graduate programs (maybe one program?), and students aren't going there for free. Are the professors and staff the highest paid on earth? What exactly is being achieved by having 5 billion in the bank? Maybe the New England ethos of the place just likes to see the bank account get bigger and bigger and save for a rainy day. Interesting how so many people (almost certainly graduates) are defending what is so painfully obvious to anyone who tours the campus.

Thank you. It did. Am an exec at a publicly traded company and continue to compete.

Oh the endowment is BIG.

Where you see it flexed, is in support of student research projects and study abroad, plus no loans financial aid. Williams even puts money into recruiting and training the financial aid students and their families to better ensure their success on campus.

The school has a mission. To be the best possible SMALL liberal arts COLLEGE and to actively support a competitive D3 intercollegiate sports program to encourage leadership. The size of the endowment is just not going to change that.

Williams achieves both usually ranked #1 small school and #1 D3 all sports school.

No different than Amherst, Bowdoin, Wesleyan, Middlebury, Swarthmore, Haverford, Pomona, Carleton, Grinnell, Claremont or even D1s Davidson, Colgate, Bucknell or Lafayette is there really any change planned from this small school mission.

Sure every once in a while there is talk of growth, or expanding grad schools...but very little. Just because funding is available does not mean you have to spend it.

Not everyone wants a small school, but if you like it, it brings lots of advantages.

The only thing the endowment teaches that others can learn from is the power of a school being open for a long time and investing wisely. This can be copied, and schools can envision where they will be as they click off 50yr milestones. Obviously, Harvard, Yale and Texas have even bigger endowments.

The Saudi government has a pretty good one too, and that's only 80 yrs old.

By the way, that $5 billion endowment was $150 million in the late 1980s at which time it grew to $300 million by the early 1990s. So, it's not big because the school was founded in 1793. It grew massively, along with many other elite college endowments in the stock market booms in the 1990s and 2010s, aided very much by favorable tax writeoffs for donations. As the #1 athletic and #1 academic school in D3, Williams is doing just fine. And their financial aid is the best of any school that charges tuition. If you make under 150k, it's free and they include in the budget typical everyday expenses for financial students, so that they don't have quite as obvious a gap to all the immensely rich students there.