WATERVILLE – Shelby M.C. Davis, whose donations to Colby College and four other institutions add up to $15 million a year, got something back during the liberal arts college’s commencement Sunday.

Davis, whose financial gifts pay tuition for scores of Colby students, received an honorary doctorate of his own. Davis also got to see 13 of the students he sponsored graduate.

A crowd estimated in the thousands attended the ceremony for the 484 graduates, which was moved indoors because of rain.

Davis’ donations pay for 93 students, or more than 5 percent of Colby’s student body, the Waterville college said. Recipients come from countries all over the world.

Davis and his family’s Davis-United World College program pay to send hundreds of students to Colby as well as Middlebury and Wellesley colleges, Princeton University and College of the Atlantic, where all financial need is met for all four years.

Colby said the diversity and the international perspectives that Davis-UWC scholars bring to the small central Maine campus have a powerful effect on what goes on in classrooms and on campus.

One of the scholars, Charles Data, fled civil war in the Sudan at age 7. His parents live in Uganda in a refugee camp and on a subsistence farm. Data graduated Sunday with honors as a government and economics double major.

In the fall, Data plans to enroll in a master’s program in international law and human rights at the United Nations University for Peace in Costa Rica.

The Davis family started the program in 2000 to provide opportunities for students who complete the secondary school program of the United World College.

The ceremony also had a sad side as Colby mourned the loss of Dawn Marie Rossignol, a student who was murdered last September in the fall of her senior year.

President William Adams presented a posthumous honorary bachelor of arts degree to Dawn’s parents, Charleen and Emilio Rossignol of Medway.

Rossignol’s loss was noted by the keynote speaker, Richard Russo, a Colby faculty member who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for his book “Empire Falls.”