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How did you choose the schools featured in the The Best 377 Colleges: 2013 Edition?
How many ranking lists are in the book, and how did you compile the lists?
Why don't you have one list that ranks all the schools in the book?
How many students were surveyed for your ranking lists?
How is the survey conducted?
When was the survey conducted?
What was the survey format?
My college is not on any of the ranking lists. Why?
How can I complete a survey about my school?
The profiles of colleges in this book, and the profiles of colleges on your site have "ratings." What's the difference between the "rankings" and the "ratings"?
What's new in this edition of the book?
Where can I buy the book?
How did you choose the schools featured in The Best 377 Colleges: 2012 Edition?
We selected these colleges and universities primarily based on our high opinion of their academics. We monitor colleges continuously and annually collect data on more than 2,000 schools. Each year we also visit scores of schools, and meet with or talk to hundreds of college administrators. We also pay close attention to the feedback we get about colleges from students, parents, educators and our own staff at Princeton Review locations across the country. We also value the opinions of our college counselors and advisors, particularly our 30-member National College Counselor Advisory Board whom we thank in the book (you'll find their names and affiliations on pages 825-826 in the print edition of the book). We don't use a mathematical formula in making our selection of schools for the book (though the college rankings in it are based on mathematical tallies of data from our student surveys).
There are two key additional criteria that have influenced our selection of schools for this book since the very first edition in 1992. One: We work to have a wide representation of outstanding colleges in the book. These include public and private institutions from all parts of the country (plus two universities in Canada and one in Ireland). There are small- and large-sized, traditional and nontraditional, highly selective and open-admission schools, plus some that are very expensive and others that are great bargains. You'll also find schools with religious affiliations, historically black colleges and universities, men's colleges, women's colleges, and some schools acclaimed for their unique focus on science, engineering, technology or other specialized fields. Two: Any college we consider adding to the guide must agree to allow us to conduct candid surveys of its students. What students say about their schools and their campus life is very important to us and to prospective applicants and their parents—especially those who are unable to visit the campuses in person. We share the opinions we gather from surveyed students in our narrative profiles about the schools, and our student surveys (more than 122,000 of them!) are the core basis for our college rankings.
How many ranking lists are in the book, and how did you compile the lists?
The Best 377 Colleges has 62 ranking lists, each one identifying the top 20 colleges (of the 377 schools in the book—not of all colleges in the nation) in a specific category. The categories cover a wide range of topics that applicants to the schools might want to know or ask about on a campus visit, including academics, administrative services, financial aid, campus amenities (like dorms and food), the student body's political leanings, race/class interaction, LGBT community acceptance, social life and much more. All 62 ranking lists are based solely on what students told us about their own colleges on our 80-question student survey. See The Princeton Review's College Rankings for information on what each of the 62 ranking lists is based on.
Why don't you have one list that ranks all the schools in the book?
We don't believe that any one school is the best overall. While academics are important—and some other college rankings focus only on academics—we believe lists that purport to rank schools academically aren't useful and are actually counterproductive. Every school under the #1 school on such lists is perceived to be "lesser" academically than the one above it. The fact is no one school is, in all subjects, for all majors, for all students, the academically best in the nation. It's not which school is best academically (there's no such thing) but which school is best for you that's important. It's easy to find an academically outstanding school it this country. But it's a challenge to find the academically outstanding school that will be the best-fit school for you.
We believe all 377 schools in the book are academically outstanding. But we don't think academics should be the exclusive reason for choosing a school—and in most cases, it isn't. Among other crucial factors (such as location, cost and size), the campus culture is very important, and varies considerably from school to school. Some colleges in our book may be ideal for some students but wrong for others, depending on their interests and needs. The schools featured in The Best 377 Colleges—our picks of the cream of the crop colleges and universities—comprise only the top 15 percent of all four-year colleges in the nation. These are all very different schools with many different and wonderful things to offer. We offer a wide range of ranking lists to help students and parents choose the best schools for them.
How many students were surveyed for your ranking lists?
The ranking lists in The Best 377 Colleges are based on our surveys of more than 122,000 students. That's an average of 325 students per school, though that number varies depending on the size of the student population. Over the years, we've surveyed anywhere from 26 men at Deep Springs College (100 percent of the student body) to over 1,000 collegians at such schools as Hofstra University, University of Mississippi, and the University of Wisconsin—Madison.
How is the survey conducted?
All of the surveys upon which the rankings in this edition of the book are based were completed online. For detailed information on this, see Surveying Colleges: How We Do It.
When was the survey conducted?
We receive surveys online from students at the schools in this book (as well as from other institutions) all year, so a sizable number of the surveys came to us in the 2011–2012 academic year. In addition, we formally re-survey each school in the book at a minimum of every three years, so some surveys upon which this edition's rankings are based are from the 2011-2012 school year, some are from the 2010–2011 school year, and some are from the 2009–2010 school year. We conduct these surveys more often once every three years if the colleges request that we do so (and we can accommodate that request) or if we deem it necessary for one reason or another. And of course, surveys we receive from students outside of their schools' normal survey cycles are always factored into the subsequent year's ranking calculations, so our pool of student survey data is continuously refreshed.
What was the survey format?
The survey has more than 80 questions across four categories. We ask students to tell us about themselves, their school's academics/administration, campus life, and their fellow students' attitudes and opinions. For the multiple-choice questions, survey respondents indicate their answers on a five-point grid. The headers for the grids vary, depending on the type of question asked. They may range from "Excellent" to "Awful" or from "Extremely" to "Not at All." In some cases the range is in percentages, from "0–20%" to "81–100%." Each college is given a score based on its students' answers to each survey question. This enables us to compare student opinions from college to college—apples to apples, as it were—and on that basis we tally the rankings. We also have several open-ended "comments" areas on the survey inviting students to tell us in their own words what they think of their schools, and we choose the most representative comments for inclusion in the narrative profiles.
My college is not on any of the ranking lists. Why?
That could be because the college isn't one of the 377 in the book. Our ranking lists are based only on our surveys of students at the schools in the book. Or it could be that the school is in the book, but there wasn't a high enough consensus of opinion among the students we surveyed in response to any of the survey questions for the school to make a list.
How can I complete a survey about my school?
It's easy, and it only takes ten to fifteen minutes. Just click here. You may submit a survey about your school once every academic year if you like, and we encourage you to do so (but our site will only accept one survey from you per year – it's not possible to "stuff the ballot box").
The profiles of colleges in this book and on your site have "ratings." What's the difference between the ratings and the rankings?
That's a good question because people sometimes confuse ratings for rankings. Our 62 rankings are lists of the top 20 schools in the book in rank order, 1 to 20, on various topics. They are based entirely on our surveys of students at the 377schools in the book who complete our 80-question survey that asks them questions ranging from how good their profs are as teachers to how they rate their college city/town. Only schools in The Best 377 Colleges can appear on our 62 ranking lists. See The Princeton Review's College Rankings for more info on them.
Our ratings are numerical scores on a scale of 60 to 99 that we give to every school in the book in eight categories: Academics, Admissions Selectivity, Financial Aid, Quality of Life, Professors Interesting, Professors Accessible, Fire Safety and Green, our newest rating. The ratings show how each school measures up on a fixed scale. We tally the ratings based on institutional data that we get from schools: some ratings factor in data from our student surveys. All schools in our book, The Best 377 Colleges, and The Best Value Colleges, and the schools we designate on our site as "regional bests"— Best in the Northeast, Best in the South, Best in the Midwest, or Best in the West—receive our eight ratings. Schools from which we have not received sufficient data to compile a rating for a particular category receive a rating of 60* (sixty with an asterisk) for that category. See The Princeton Review's College Ratings for more info.
What's new in this edition of the book?
We added six colleges to this edition: Allegheny College (Meadville, PA), Becker College (Worcester, MA), City University of New York-City College (New York, NY), University of Hawaii-Manoa, University of Tampa (FL), and Virginia Wesleyan College (Virginia Beach, VA).
We added a new ranking list category, "Their Students Love These Colleges." It reports the 20 colleges in the book at which students expressed the highest overall satisfaction with their college on our student survey. Kudos to our #1 school on this new list - Claremont McKenna College.
We expanded our section, "Great Schools for The Most Popular Majors" to identify top schools for 20 majors. The five majors we added to this section are: Agriculture, Environmental Studies, Health Services, Mathematics, and Nursing.
All of the data in the book is of course updated – we reach out directly to our contacts at the colleges to collect that info and we update the statistics in each of our school profiles every year. We also give every college the opportunity to review, fact check and report to us any incorrect information in their profile before our book goes to press. Our 62 "top 20" ranking lists are also of course newly compiled, as are our Honor Roll lists of schools that received our highest possible score (99) for in our rating tallies for Financial Aid, Fire Safety and Green. Our tallies of our eight rating scores for all 377 schools are also annually done.
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