The Davis United World College Scholars Program, founded in 2000 by Shelby M.C. Davis and Philip O. Geier, is the world's largest privately funded international scholarship program. It now supports over 2,500 undergraduates (from 148 nations) at 90 U.S. colleges and universities.

Middlebury is a liberal arts college of the first rank, an achievement that is the result of a process of growth and change that began in 1800, when a few men of the town of Middlebury took upon themselves the challenge of building a college in a small New England town, on what was then the American frontier. Over the more than two centuries since it was established, Middlebury has developed from "the town's college" into an institution of international renown.