Davis United World College Scholars Program


The Davis United World College Scholars Program awards need-based scholarship funding, aka the Shelby Davis Scholarship, to graduates of schools and colleges in the United World Colleges movement to study at 94 select partner universities in the United States. The Program is the largest international scholarship program for undergraduates in the world, and the Davis family's contributions to the United World Colleges movement are the largest ever made by a single donor to international education.1 Shelby Davis, the scholarship's namesake, is an investor whose largest fund, Davis New York Venture, was named to the Forbes Honour Roll for mutual fund investments; he is the son of Shelby Cullom Davis.
Davis co-founded the scholarship program in 2000 along with Phil Geier, former President of UWC-USA. Once UWC graduates enrol in one of the Program's partner U.S. colleges or universities, the Program provides financial support for their undergraduate educations through institutional grants that support need-based scholarships. Originally, the scholarship was offered to students matriculating at one of five colleges in the United States: the College of the Atlantic, Middlebury College, Colby College, Wellesley College and Princeton University. The network of eligible universities has since grown to 95.
The scholarship is unusual as it is restricted to students who have already faced heavy competition, in their penultimate year of high school, to be accepted to, and to complete the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme at, one of the 18 schools or colleges in the United World Colleges movement. UWC is an educational movement including 18 sixth form colleges and full schools located throughout the world that educate international students from 160 countries, with a focus on peace and sustainability. The schools and colleges offer partial and full scholarships permitting talented students of all socio-economic backgrounds to attend.

Participating universities

Names marked with an asterisk signify the original five universities.
  1. Agnes Scott College
  2. Amherst College
  3. Bard College
  4. Barnard College
  5. Bates College
  6. Bowdoin College
  7. Brandeis University
  8. Brown University
  9. Bryn Mawr College
  10. Bucknell University
  11. Carleton College
  12. Claremont McKenna College
  13. Clark University
  14. Colby College*
  15. Colgate University
  16. College of the Atlantic*
  17. College of the Holy Cross
  18. College of Idaho
  19. College of Notre Dame of Maryland
  20. Colorado College
  21. Columbia University
  22. Connecticut College
  23. Cornell University
  24. Dartmouth College
  25. Denison University
  26. Dickinson College
  27. Drexel University
  28. Duke University
  29. Earlham College
  30. Franklin & Marshall College
  31. Georgetown University
  32. Gettysburg College
  33. Grinnell College
  34. Hamilton College
  35. Harvard College
  36. Haverford College
  37. Hood College
  38. Johns Hopkins University
  39. Kalamazoo College
  40. Kenyon College
  41. Lafayette College
  42. Lake Forest College
  43. Lehigh University
  44. Lewis & Clark College
  45. Luther College
  46. Macalester College
  47. Methodist University
  48. Middlebury College*
  49. MIT
  50. Mount Holyoke College
  51. New York University
  52. Northwestern University
  53. Oberlin College
  54. Occidental College**
  55. Pomona College**
  56. Princeton University*
  57. Randolph-Macon College
  58. Reed College
  59. Ringling College of Art and Design
  60. San Francisco Art Institute
  61. Sarah Lawrence College**
  62. Scripps College
  63. School of the Art Institute of Chicago
  64. Skidmore College
  65. Smith College
  66. St. John's College
  67. St. Lawrence University
  68. St. Olaf College**
  69. Stanford University
  70. Swarthmore College
  71. Trinity College
  72. Tufts University
  73. Union College
  74. University of California, Berkeley
  75. University of Chicago
  76. University of Florida
  77. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
  78. University of Notre Dame
  79. University of Oklahoma
  80. University of Pennsylvania
  81. University of Rochester
  82. University of Richmond
  83. University of Virginia
  84. Vassar College
  85. Wartburg College
  86. Washington & Lee University
  87. Wellesley College*
  88. Wesleyan University
  89. Westminster College
  90. Wheaton College
  91. Whitman College
  92. Williams College
  93. Yale University