Williams College

Williams College is a private liberal arts college located in Williamstown, Massachusetts, United States. It was established in 1793 with funds from the estate of Ephraim Williams. Originally a men's college, Williams became co-educational in 1970. Fraternities were also phased out during this period, beginning in 1962.

Williams has 24 departments, 36 majors, and two master's degree programs in art history and development economics. There are 334 voting faculty members, with a student-to-faculty ratio of 7:1. As of 2012, the school has an enrollment of 2,052 undergraduate students and 54 graduate students.

Colonel Ephraim Williams was an officer in the Massachusetts militia and a member of a prominent landowning family. His will included a bequest to support and maintain a free school to be established in the town of West Hoosac, Massachusetts, provided that the town change its name to Williamstown. Williams was killed at the Battle of Lake George on September 8, 1755.

After Shays' Rebellion, the Williamstown Free School opened with 15 students on October 26, 1791. The first president was Ebenezer Fitch. Not long after its founding, the trustees of the school petitioned the Massachusetts legislature to convert the free school to a tuition-based college. The legislature agreed and on June 22, 1793, Williams College was chartered. It was the second college to be founded in Massachusetts.

In 1806, a student prayer meeting gave rise to the American Foreign Mission Movement. In August of that year, five students met in the maple grove of Sloan's Meadow to pray. A thunderstorm drove them to the shelter of a haystack, and the fervor of the ensuing meeting inspired them to take the Gospel abroad. The students went on to build the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, the first American organization to send missionaries overseas. The Haystack Monument near Mission Park on the Williams Campus commemorates the historic "Haystack Prayer Meeting.

Williams College is the site of the Hopkins Observatory, the oldest extant astronomical observatory in the United States. Erected in 1836–1838, it now contains the Mehlin Museum of Astronomy, including Alvan Clark's first telescope (from 1852), as well as the Milham Planetarium, which uses a Zeiss Skymaster ZKP3/B optomechanical projector and an Ansible digital projector, both installed in 2005. The Hopkins Observatory's 0.6-m DFM reflecting telescope (1991) is installed elsewhere on the campus. Williams joins with Wellesley, Wesleyan, Middlebury, Colgate, Vassar, Swarthmore, and Haverford /Bryn Mawr to form the Keck Northeast Astronomy Consortium, sponsored for over a decade by the Keck Foundation and now with its student research programs sponsored by the National Science Foundation.

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Loyola University New Orleans

Loyola University New Orleans is a private, co-educational, and Jesuit university located in New Orleans, Louisiana. Originally established as Loyola College in 1904, the institution was chartered as a university in 1912. It bears the name of the Jesuit patron,Saint Ignatius of Loyola. Loyola is one of 28 member institutions that make up the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities and, with its current enrollment of approximately 5000 students, is among the larger Jesuit universities in the southern United States. Loyola University New Orleans is ranked eleventh best institution among Southern regional universities offering masters and undergraduate degrees in the 2015 issue of the annual America's Best Colleges issue and guidebook published by U.S. News & World Report.

Loyola University New Orleans was founded by the Society of Jesus in 1904 as Loyola College on a section of the Foucher Plantation bought by the Jesuits in 1886. A young Jesuit, Fr. Albert Biever, was given a nickel for street car fare and told by his Jesuit superiors to travel Uptown on the St. Charles Streetcar and found a university. As with many Jesuit schools, it contained both a college and preparatory academy. The first classes of Loyola College were held in a residence behind Most Holy Name of Jesus Church. Fr. Biever was the first president.

The university enrolls 5,000 students, including 3,000 undergraduates. The student to faculty ratio is 11 to 1. The Princeton Review features Loyola New Orleans in the 2010 edition of its annual book, The Best 371 Colleges. Loyola University New Orleans ranks 11th of the South regional universities in 2015 U.S. News & World Report Best College Ranking. The New York-based education services company says Loyola New Orleans offers students an outstanding undergraduate education.

Loyola grew steadily over the years on its uptown campus. By the end of its first decade, the university not only included the College of Arts and Sciences, but also a School of Law (1914), a School of Dentistry (1914), and a College of Pharmacy (1919).

Several years later, a School of Music was added to the growing curriculum. At the time, the university's campus consisted mainly of Marquette and Bobet Halls, with large athletic fields extending back towards the end of the campus at Freret St. Loyola has the distinction of transmitting the first radio broadcast in the Deep South, when WWL began operation as a laboratory experiment on March 31, 1922.

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Albertus Magnus College

Albertus Magnus College was founded in 1925 by the Dominican Sisters of St. Mary of the Springs. The dedication speaker was James Rowland Angell, the president of nearby Yale University. All classes and offices were first housed in Rosary Hall, a Palladian-style mansion that has since been converted for use as the institution's main library. The college's first chaplain, Rev. Arthur Chandler, stated that the college's initial goal was to educate women "to become thinkers and leaders and the noble among the ladyhood of the future.

By 1940 the campus had expanded to its current 50 acre size and absorbed a variety of surrounding gilded-era mansions for use as dormitories and office space. The school became known for its strict liberal arts curriculum that required four years of Latin or Greek study.

Originally a women's college, the institution became coeducational in 1985 to some controversy. The 1980s also brought a series of construction projects to the campus, including new classroom space and a new athletic center. The first graduate program, a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies, was offered in 1992.

In addition to undergraduate majors, minors and concentrations, including pre-professional preparation, there are graduate programs in art therapy, leadership, liberal studies, fine arts in creative writing, human services, business administration, education, and management and organizational leadership.

The main campus is located about two miles (3 km) from the central campus of Yale University in a residential area known as Prospect Hill near the border with Hamden. The neighborhood is on Prospect Street just above Edgerton Park and near East Rock.

The college uses several of the area's historic 19th century mansions as residence halls and administrative buildings.

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University of Chicago

The University of Chicago  is a private research university in Chicago. The university, established in 1890, consists of The College, various graduate programs, interdisciplinary committees organized into four academic research divisions and seven professional schools. Beyond the arts and sciences, Chicago is also well known for its professional schools, which include the Pritzker School of Medicine, the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, the Law School, the School of Social Service Administration, the Harris School of Public Policy Studies, the Graham School of Continuing Liberal and Professional Studies and the Divinity School. The university currently enrolls approximately 5,000 students in the College and around 15,000 students overall.

The University of Chicago is home to many prominent alumni. 89 Nobel laureates have been affiliated with the university as visiting professors, students, faculty, or staff, the fourth most of any institution in the world. In addition, Chicago's alumni include 49 Rhodes Scholars, 21 Marshall Scholars, 9 Fields Medalists, 13 National Humanities Medalists, 13 billionaire graduates, and a plethora of members of the United States Congress and heads of state of countries all over the world.

In 1929, the university's fifth president, Robert Maynard Hutchins, took office; the university underwent many changes during his 24-year tenure. Hutchins eliminated varsity football from the university in an attempt to emphasize academics over athletics, instituted the undergraduate college's liberal-arts curriculum known as the Common Core,and organized the university's graduate work into its current four divisions.In 1933, Hutchins proposed an unsuccessful plan to merge the University of Chicago and Northwestern University into a single university. During his term, the University of Chicago Hospitals (now called the University of Chicago Medical Center) finished construction and enrolled its first medical students

Students at the University of Chicago run over 400 clubs and organizations known as Recognized Student Organizations (RSOs).These include cultural and religious groups, academic clubs and teams, and common-interest organizations. Notable extracurricular groups include the University of Chicago College Bowl Team, which has won 118 tournaments and 15 national championships, leading both categories internationally. The university's competitive Model United Nations team was the top ranked team in North America in 2013-14 and 2014-2015.

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Emory University

Emory University is a private doctoral university in metropolitan Atlanta, located in the Druid Hills section of unincorporated DeKalb County, Georgia, United States. The university was founded as Emory College in 1836 in Oxford, Georgia by the Methodist Episcopal Church and was named in honor of Methodist bishop John Emory. In 1915, the college relocated to metropolitan Atlanta and was rechartered as Emory University. The university is the second-oldest private institution of higher education in Georgia and among the fifty oldest private universities in the United States.

Emory College, as with the entire Southeastern United States, struggled to overcome financial devastation during the Reconstruction Era. In 1880, Atticus Greene Haygood, Emory College President, delivered a speech expressing gratitude for the end of slavery in the United States, which captured the attention of George I. Seney, a New York banker. Seney gave Emory College $5,000 to repay its debts, $50,000 for construction, and $75,000 to establish a new endowment. In the 1880s, the technology department was launched by Isaac Stiles Hopkins, a polymath professor at Emory College. Hopkins became the first president of the Georgia Institute of Technologyin 1888. Emory University's first international student, Yun Chi-ho, graduated in 1893. Yun became an important political activist in Korea and is the author of "Aegukga", the national anthem of the Republic of Korea.

Emory University has a Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education status of RU/VH: "very high research activity". According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, the university is 5th among universities in the United States with licensing revenue per dollars spent on research. The university is the 4th largest contributor in the nation to the discovery of new drugs and vaccines among public-sector research institutions. The Universities Allied for Essential Medicines, ranked Emory 6th among universities in the United States and Canada for global health contributions and research. In 2015, Emory received $572.4 million from external funding agencies. Emory University leads the nation in the number of students with Kirschstein-National Research Service Awardpre-doctoral fellowships from the National Institutes of Health.

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