The Best 386 Colleges, 2021 Edition | College Rankings and Ratings
The Best 386 Colleges, 2021 Edition The Princeton Review Hi, everyone. I’m Rob Franek, Editor-in-Chief at The Princeton Review, and this is the week we look forward to all year: We launched the 29th edition of our book and rankings for The Best 386 Colleges, 2021 Edition, published by our colleagues at Penguin Random House. As we’ve talked about before, the very best thing you can do to ensure that you get accepted to your dream college—and then have a great experience once you get there—is to look for fit. There is no #1 school that would be #1 for everyone. And if you are looking for that #1 overall school, you may end up bypassing the school that’s really your #1 college. How do you know what that is? There are schools that have the academic programs, extracurricular offerings, campus communities, and values that make them a great fit for you. And that’s what the book—and our vision of college admission—is all about. It’s also why we don’t have one list that ranks schools from 1 to 100 or even to 500, as some lists do. Instead, we have 62 ranking lists of the top 20 schools across a range of categories, including academics, financial aid, campus life, extracurriculars, social scene, and politics.
Each school featured in the book has a 2-page profile with info that you won’t find anywhere else—including our “Inside Word” on their admissions, Financial Aid rating, and direct quotes from students. Speaking of students—here’s another thing that’s different about our approach: We ask students about their college experiences on campus. So our rankings aren’t based on our opinions—they’re based on the perspectives of their own students—143,000 of them at the 386 colleges in the book. We asked students 85 questions, and they rated everything from their professors to career services to their college towns, and reported on their campus experiences at their schools. And our 62 ranking lists report on what they said. So what did they say? Well, a lot of families are stressed about finances—now more than ever. When we reported on our survey of nearly 13,000 parents and students about their biggest college hopes and worries back in March—can you guess what their biggest worry was? For the 8th year running, it was the level of debt to pay for the degree.
The Best 386 Colleges includes a Financial Aid Rating score for every single school in the book, along with intel about the average dollar amounts of grant aid that each school provides. We’ve also got a list of Best Value Colleges that tells you where you’ll get the biggest return on your tuition investment—in terms of a wide range of factors, from academics, costs, financial aid, and debt—to graduation rates as well as alumni career and salary data. You can find all of this info in our book and on our website, PrincetonReview.com. When we were doing our homework for Best 386 Colleges, we asked students about their overall satisfaction with their financial aid packages. Do you know what the #1 school this year is? Vanderbilt University—where the *average* undergraduate need-based scholarship is $52,200. Vanderbilt also earned high rankings in a bunch of categories, including its college city of Nashville, school newspaper, science labs, and library.
We have a list called “Their Students Love These Colleges,” and Vanderbilt earned the #1 spot on that, as well. Let’s talk about another #1 school. Right now, as online and hybrid learning become the status quo for the foreseeable future, lots of students—and non-students—are struggling with feelings of isolation. Access to mental healthcare is more important than ever. This year, for the first time, we have a ranking list featuring Counseling Services. The top-ranked school on that list is…Virginia Tech. Virginia Tech’s Cook Counseling Center offers individual as well as group counseling, psychiatric care and psychotherapy, and educational programming.
The school wants to make sure that every student who needs it will have access to support. Like Vanderbilt, Virginia Tech also earned a top spot on our lists for great town-gown relations and campus food—and of course, on “Their Students Love These Colleges.” What do students love? The administration, career services, the labs, recreation facilities—they love being part of the Hokie Nation. So far, we’ve talked about what students and families are worried about: They’re worried about money, they’re worried about healthcare, and mental healthcare in particular. But when you think about what makes college worth it, you probably imagine amazing professors and stellar career opportunities. So I want to take just a moment to highlight schools that earned the top spots on those ranking lists, according to their students. We have a ranking list called “Professors Get High Marks,” and topping that list is Mt.
Holyoke College in Massachusetts. One student wrote that the professors are “wonderful scholars and wonderful people.” Another told us that they provide hands-on lab experience as well as real-world scenarios and creative teaching exercises. And they appreciate that their professors “prioritize their students above all else.” Their professors’ skills as teachers will be especially important this fall, when instruction—whether it’s in the classroom or online—will be unusual: socially distanced, with fewer in-person opportunities. Having professors who know how to connect with students will be more important than ever. Another thing that’s really important is launching a career after graduation—and Bentley University just outside of Boston earned the #1 spot on our Best Career Services ranking list. Bentley’s award-winning career development team works with students individually to evaluate their interests and skills, set goals, and of course to help them achieve those goals, from finding internships to acing interviews and ultimately landing awesome jobs after graduation. In a challenging economy, those services will be more important than ever. Check out our website to see all of our Best 386 Colleges, and to do a customized college search, where you put in the criteria that matter most to you—from location to available majors to extracurriculars to any one of our 62 ranking lists—and find schools that could be your great fit.
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