Wheaton College provides a transformative liberal arts education, combining theory and practice, for intellectually curious students within a collaborative and vibrant extended community and network that values and strives to create an equitable and just world.
Our institutional fundraising goals are connected to the priorities at the heart of Wheaton’s liberal arts mission—the Compass Curriculum, scholarships and financial aid, experiential learning, faculty, athletics, the revitalization and preservation of our beautiful campus, and the academic and co-curricular programs that define our community’s commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging.
We seek support at every level from the community—alumni, parents, and friends—who will partner with the college to support Wheaton’s mission.
Wheaton Fund
When you make a Wheaton Fund leadership gift you contribute to the fiscal strength of the institution. Your gift supports the experiences that have come to define our institution and that prepare Wheaton students to become leaders in their communities, our nation, and around the world.
By contributing each and every year, you give new strength and vision to the value of Wheaton’s distinctive liberal arts education. When you demonstrate your support through the Wheaton Fund, you provide for a variety of learning experiences in the classroom and beyond.
Now more than ever, leadership gifts through the Wheaton Fund are essential to the college’s annual fundraising efforts. You can direct your gift to the area of greatest need, to the arts or STEM learning, to the library, or athletics. You can support financial aid by pledging a multi-year Wheaton Fund scholarship, or you could support experiential learning by establishing a Wheaton Fund internship.
More information about Wheaton Fund gift opportunities can be found below.
Life and Career Design Institute
Integrating classroom, experiential, and co-curricular elements within a framework of personal growth, the Institute for Life and Career Design will provide Wheaton students with a framework for lifelong learning and career development shaped by experiences inside the classroom and through experiential learning opportunities. Students will be guided by a MAP—Mentored Academic Pathway—as they explore and design their careers.
Programming offered through the Life and Career Design Institute will focus students on designing their own Wheaton experience and their post-Wheaton life and career. Life design provides space for learners to explore work and career alongside other important elements of abundant life, including physical and mental health, relationships, and play.
The Life and Career Design Institute will chart a clear, applied path for students:
- Deliver on our mission of rigor and practice
- Positively impact retention and graduation rates
- Engage fully with the Compass Curriculum
- Offer internships, field research, and service learning for credit
- Address opportunity inequities such that all Wheaton students graduate with experiential learning
- Engage alumni and parents more meaningfully and effectively as mentors; build a robust Wheaton network
- And differentiate Wheaton from our competition.
“We will engage all students with the life design method, including a bias toward action and prototyping, an emphasis on self-awareness and reflection, and an awareness of the individual interplay of life, family, career, health, wellness, play, and other factors for life abundantly. We will ensure that students have many touchpoints with experiential learning and career development.”
~ Darnell T. Parker, Ed.D., Vice President for Student Affairs and Dean of Students
Gift opportunities to support the Institute for Life and Career Design can be found below.
Student support
Transformative scholarships
A strong financial aid program is critical to Wheaton’s ability to matriculate the brightest students. Named scholarships, whether endowed or through the Wheaton Fund, have proven to be an effective way for our alumni, parents, and friends to bolster our financial aid offerings. These named annual-use scholarships complement our endowed scholarships. Sustaining this annual support is a priority for the college.
“I really enjoy being at Wheaton because I get to play my favorite sport, field hockey, while receiving a higher education! I love taking classes related to visual arts and the history of art. The courses at Wheaton are challenging, engaging, and interesting. I also like to draw, read, and learn about fashion history in my free time! I hope to go to graduate school after Wheaton, and then pursue a career at a museum. I am interested in working with collections as a registrar or a curator!”
~ Kate Anzidei ‘25, History of Art | Jane Cumming ’67 Wheaton Fund Scholarship
Impactful internships
In 2015, the college launched the Wheaton Edge, a signature program that guarantees access to internship funding to ensure that every student has the opportunity to apply their knowledge and skills in a real-world setting. Wheaton College relies heavily on philanthropic support to fund internships, research opportunities, and volunteer experiences in fields as diverse as global security, publishing, environmental sustainability, international business, and diplomacy. Wheaton students take part in immersive learning experiences around the world.
“My internship was at Riverside Community Care, a community-based non-profit organization serving more than 40,000 people a year in Massachusetts that offers a wide range of mental healthcare. I was able to sit in on and observe sessions with youth patients and clinicians. One patient was a very guarded person when it came to her traumas and history. I earned her trust, and she felt I was worthy to hear her story—that meant everything to me. From there, I made other connections with youth. I found that I had to tailor certain aspects of my personality to certain youths, which was interesting. I also learned through conversations with my co-workers that this is a great field with lots of room to grow. I am certain that I want to pursue a master’s in social work or mental health counseling. I developed many new skills, such as patience, written communication (writing clinical notes), leading clinical rounds, developing a work-life balance, and the ability to plan and co-facilitate therapeutic groups.”
~ T’Nysha Peete ’25 | Psychology Major
Leadership development
On campus, we are always working to update and enhance Wheaton’s curricular and co-curricular offerings. We are strengthening campus-wide collaboration and experimentation so that the college can readily adapt to changes in practice, technology, and pedagogy. Students have abundant opportunities to find their passion and to hone their leadership skills through academic clubs, the arts, athletics, and through our growing programs in social entrepreneurship.
Faculty support
Wheaton’s celebrated faculty are leaders in their field of study whose commitment to undergraduate classroom teaching is equaled by the passion they bring to their research. They earn teaching and research grants from NASA, the NEA and NEH, the Whiting Foundation, Mellon Foundation, and more prestigious honors and awards. They are especially committed to the idea of a personalized education, wherein faculty work with students as collaborators, helping provide every student with opportunities to explore their own unique interests, while offering insightful guidance and support.
Gift opportunities to support our promising students and world-class faculty are outlined below.
Compass Curriculum
Compass gives students the freedom and flexibility to create their own path to success, with personalized advising and professional mentorship. The curriculum encourages students to connect academics to career interests and builds on Wheaton’s core principles of global citizenship, experiential learning, social justice, diversity and inclusion, collaborative community and intellectual curiosity.
The Compass Curriculum reflects the key elements of a Wheaton education, encouraging academic rigor, career exploration, and skills development.
Connected First-Year Experience: Taught by faculty teams, the First-Year Experience course combines the deep discussions, reading and writing of a traditional first-year seminar with cross-discipline discovery, encouraging students to consider complex problems and questions through multiple lenses, right from the start.
Sophomore Experience: In their second year, students begin infusing their education with real-world experience and professional connections, through a required service or research project, internship, practicum, study abroad or other experiential opportunity.
The Major: Students must choose at least one major and meet course and experience requirements for those programs or may develop an independent major, working with faculty to craft an appropriate list of coursework. Students may also choose minors and/or additional majors, with additional course requirements.
Mentored Academic Pathway (MAP): Students will meet regularly with staff and faculty advisors as they craft their educational plan, follow up, reflect and refine that plan. A required portfolio will help students reflect on their experiences, set their goals and chart their course, present their work and share with employers and post-graduate programs.
Honor Recognition for Wheaton Scholars: The Compass Curriculum provides for a Global Honors recognition for students who achieve advanced proficiency in a second language, engage with other countries and cultures and complete a global project or study abroad program. Students taking classes spanning eight areas, including the sciences, social sciences and arts/humanities, will be recognized as Eliza Wheaton Arts and Sciences Scholars. And students who pursue Wheaton’s mission of social justice, inclusion and diversity by taking courses that address these issues across several departments, will be distinguished as Taylor and Lane Social Justice Scholars, which has been named for the first two African-American women to graduate from Wheaton.
Professional Experience and Mentorship: Other elements can be built into a student’s path to guide and support them while encouraging them to develop key skills in their fields:
- LEAPS certificate: LEAPS stands for Liberal Arts and Professional Success, a set of elective courses that are skills-focused, interdisciplinary and experiential, overseen by both a faculty advisor and alumni mentor.
- Skills courses: Elective courses that help build specific professional and life skills.
- The Wheaton Edge: Guaranteed support for internships and other deep-impact experiential learning opportunities as well as campus leadership experiences.
“Compass provides the opportunity to meet many more students where they are when they arrive at Wheaton. It will help them forge paths that fit with their own interests and their own strengths, blending the breadth of a liberal arts education with preparation for life after college. It honors the kind of risk-taking and intellectual curiosity that we hope our students bring to Wheaton or develop once they’re here.”
~ Karen McCormack, Ph.D., Interim Provost and the Dorothy Reed Williams Professor of the Social Sciences
Wheaton seeks support for the continued implementation of the Compass Curriculum. Gift opportunities can be found below.
Center for Collaborative Teaching and Learning
Wheaton is a community filled with innovative educators who are dedicated to student success. With so many examples of exciting pedagogy, it makes sense that the Center for Collaborative Teaching and Learning (CCTL) highlights the creativity and excellence of our own master educators.
As a driver of sustained curricular innovation, the Center for CCTL reflects Wheaton’s values as a culturally and racially diverse learning community that is inclusive of different learners. The center will partner with its collaborators to develop programming to understand the diversity of our student body and to support engaged inclusion in the classroom and in co-curricular learning. Headquartered in the Madeleine Clark Wallace Library, the CCTL promotes faculty and staff scholarly research and publication in the fields of teaching and learning and educational development.
“We recognize that learning happens both inside and outside of the classroom, and the inclusion of staff in integral leadership positions within the Center for Collaborative Teaching and Learning will enable us to make the most of these learning opportunities. Having a space in the Library dedicated to collaboration between faculty, staff, and students will create new learning opportunities for everyone in our campus community.”
~ Cary Gouldin, Humanities Liaison, Madeleine Clark Wallace Library
Leadership Gift Opportunities
With support from our loyal philanthropic partners and sound fiscal management, Wheaton will continue to invest in programs that foster growth, promote innovation, expand access to opportunity, and preserve our historic campus. The transformative liberal arts experience that Wheaton provides is a powerful force for creating positive change in the world, and we will continue to build on that tradition.
We appreciate your investment in Wheaton College, and we welcome the opportunity to partner with you on the following strategic initiatives.
Wheaton Fund
Institute for Life and Career Design
Student Support
Faculty Support
Compass Curriculum
Center for Collaborative Teaching and Learning
