New College Featured in 2010 Edition of The Princeton Review’s “The Best 371 Colleges”
New College of Florida has once again been named one of the country’s best institutions for undergraduate education, according to The Princeton Review. The education services company features the school in the new 2010 edition of its popular guidebook, “The Best 371 Colleges.”
This marks the eighth consecutive year that New College has been included in The Princeton Review’s annual “Best Colleges” issue. The school also regularly appears in the Princeton Review’s annual rankings of “Best Value Colleges.”
Only about 15% of America’s 2,500 four-year colleges and two Canadian colleges are profiled in this year’s edition of “The Best 371 Colleges,” which is The Princeton Review’s flagship annual college guide. It includes detailed profiles of the colleges with school rating scores in eight categories, plus ranking lists of top 20 schools in 62 categories based on The Princeton Review’s surveys of students attending the colleges.
Said Robert Franek, The Princeton Review’s vice president for publishing and author of “The Best 371 Colleges,” in announcing New College’s inclusion in the book, “We commend New College of Florida for its outstanding academics, which is the primary criteria for our choice of schools for the book. We make our choices based on institutional data we gather about schools, feedback from students attending them, and input from our staff who visit hundreds of colleges each year.”
In its profile on New College, The Princeton Review praises the school for its “unique and unconventional” academic program that “provides challenging courses for highly self-motivated students who want a large amount of control over their academic choices.” According to the Review, New College’s emphasis on academic freedom and student engagement means students are “free to do what they please but while also being held to high academic standards.”
In addition to its emphasis on academic and student life, The Princeton Review also includes an array of 62 ranking lists in “The Best 371 Colleges,” each based on its survey of 122,000 students (about 325 per campus on average) attending the colleges in the book. The lists, which range from heady (e.g., Professors Get High Marks) to hedonistic (e.g., Best Party Schools), attract plenty of attention from the news media each year despite The Princeton Review’s claim that its publication should be viewed more for its academic evaluations rather than its sometimes tongue-in-cheek institutional rankings.
Among the ranking lists that New College was included in for 2010 are the following:
- #10 for Professors Get High Marks
- #6 for Great Financial Aid
- #5 for Most Politically Active Students
- #3 for Gay Community Accepted, and
- #2 for Dodgeball Targets, a wink to the College’s lack of intramural athletic programs.
“It is an honor to once again be included in The Princeton Review’s ranking of America’s ‘Best Colleges’,” said New College President Mike Michalson. “With no football team or other athletic programs to garner national attention, it is significant for small, liberal arts colleges like New College to receive the type of recognition for sound academics that publications like The Princeton Review provide.”
“The Best 371 Colleges” is the 18th edition of The Princeton Review’s annual “best colleges” book and is available now in bookstores around the country. The Princeton Review also posts the school profiles and ranking lists in “The Best 371 Colleges” on its website, at which users can read FAQs about the book, the surveys, and the criteria for each of the ratings and rankings included in the guidebook.