George Mason will graduate one of its most diverse classes in university history at its 49th Annual Spring Commencement at 10 a.m. Saturday at EagleBank Arena.
The candidates for bachelor’s degrees come from 51 countries and 36 states as well as the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. The candidates for master’s, law and doctorate degrees hail from 56 countries and 42 states, plus Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. About one-third of the undergraduates will be the first in their families to graduate from a four-year institution.
Mason President Ángel Cabrera will host the event for a graduating class of more than 8,500 and their families. Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe will deliver the Commencement address.
McAuliffe, who has championed higher education at state public colleges and universities as a key building block of his “new Virginia economy,” is a frequent visitor to Mason. He helped launch the Institute for Biomedical Innovation on the Science and Technology Campus and in December announced the research partnership between Mason and Inova Health System.
At Commencement, Cabrera will present the Mason Medal, the university’s highest honorary award, to Charles J. “Chuck” Colgan, the longest-serving state senator in Virginia history; Dr. Long V. Nguyen, namesake of Mason’s engineering building and a former Mason Board of Visitors member; and Jim Larrañaga, the men’s basketball coach who led Mason to the Final Four in 2006.
Colgan retired in January after 40 years in office. He is an ardent supporter of the university and helped secure funding at the state level for growth at Mason, including the Science and Technology Campus in Prince William County, his home district.
Nguyen, a Mason Board of Visitors member from 2002 to 2010, is founder, chairman, and CEO of Pragmatics Inc., an information technology firm in McLean, Va., that he established in 1985. The Long and Kimmy Nguyen Engineering Building on the Fairfax Campus was named in honor of the Nguyens, who in 2009 gave $5 million to Mason.
Larrañaga guided the Mason men’s basketball team to five NCAA tournament appearances during his 14 years as head coach, including a rousing run to the 2006 Final Four that brought the university unprecedented national recognition.
This year’s student speaker, Andrew Leich, will graduate with a BS in economics with a concentration in management. Leich, a recipient of the Thomas Sowell PhD Endowed Scholar Award, served as freshman class president and during his time at Mason studied international trade and finance, and labor economics, at Saint Catherine’s College at the University of Oxford.
The Class of 2016 includes 5,235 candidates for bachelor’s degrees, 2,815 candidates for master’s degrees, 130 candidates for law degrees and 322 candidates for doctoral degrees.
The top five undergraduate majors this year are the same as the top five the past two years, in a slightly different order. They are criminology, law and society (339); information technology (326); psychology (321); biology (265) and accounting (256).
Twenty-six percent of the undergraduates are earning degrees in STEM fields. Another 10 percent are earning degrees in the health sciences.
The top five master’s majors are curriculum and instruction (351), special education (184), public policy (115), public administration (113) and social work (98).
Education tops the doctorate list, followed by nursing, psychology, environmental science and public policy, and computational science and informatics.