TCNJ featured in new 2010 edition of The Princeton Review Guidebook: The Best 371 Colleges

EWING, NJ … The College of New Jersey is one of the country’s best institutions for undergraduate education, according to The Princeton Review. The education services company features the College in the new 2010 edition of its popular guidebook, The Best 371 Colleges. TCNJ also joins the ranks of Harvard, Princeton, Columbia and Cornell among […]

Words by TCNJ's editorial staff

EWING, NJ … The College of New Jersey is one of the country’s best institutions for undergraduate education, according to The Princeton Review. The education services company features the College in the new 2010 edition of its popular guidebook, The Best 371 Colleges. TCNJ also joins the ranks of Harvard, Princeton, Columbia and Cornell among the nation’s best-ranked college libraries (#17).

Only about 15 percent of America’s 2,500 four-year colleges and two Canadian colleges are profiled in the book, 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.

Says Robert Franek, Princeton Review’s V.P., Publishing and author of The Best 371 Colleges, “We commend TCNJ for its outstanding academics, which is the primary criteria for our choice of schools for the book. We also work to keep a wide representation of colleges in the book by region, size, selectivity and character. 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 a year. We also value the opinions and suggestions of our 23-member National College Counselor Advisory Board, and independent college counselors we hear from yearlong.”

In its profile on TCNJ The Princeton Review praises the school for its small-college experience that offers a highly respected degree for a bargain-basement price, and quotes extensively from TCNJ students The Princeton Review surveyed for the book. Among their comments about their campus experiences are:

Academics

• “a small, liberal arts, state school that offers, to the best of its abilities, everything that a private school offers”

Life

• “a beautiful campus, great location, top-notch faculty, the newest technology, an interested student body, and competitive sports teams”
• TCNJ really “is the total package.”

Student Body

• “smart, dedicated people who care about their education very much”

The Princeton Review’s 62 ranking lists in The Best 371 Colleges are entirely based on its survey of 122,000 students (about 325 per campus on average) attending the colleges in the book. The 80-question survey asks students to rate their schools on several topics and report on their campus experiences at them. Topics range from student assessments of their professors, administrators, financial aid, and campus food. Other ranking lists are based on student reports about their student body’s political leanings, race/class relations, gay community acceptance, and other aspects of campus life.

The Princeton Review does not rank the colleges in the book academically, or from 1 to 371 in any category, nor do the rankings reflect The Princeton Review’s opinion of the schools. A college’s appearance on a ranking list is entirely the result of a high consensus among its surveyed students about a topic compared with that of students at other schools answering the same survey question(s) on the ranking list topic.

In a “Survey Says. . .” sidebar in the book’s profile on TCNJ, The Princeton Review lists topics that TCNJ students surveyed for the book were in most agreement about in their answers to survey questions. The list includes: “great lab facilities,” “school is well run,” “students are friendly and happy” and “low cost of living.”

The school profiles in The Best 371 Colleges also have ratings that are based largely on institutional data The Princeton Review collected during the 2008-09 academic year. The ratings are scores on a scale of 60 to 99 that are tallied in eight categories. Among them are ratings for Admissions Selectivity, Financial Aid, Fire Safety, and Green, a rating The Princeton Review introduced in 2008 that is a measure of school’s commitment to environmentally related policies, practices and education. Among the ratings in the profile on TCNJ are scores of 94 for Quality of Life, 95 for Fire Safety, and 90 for its Green rating.

The Princeton Review posts the school profiles and ranking lists in The Best 371 Colleges on its site www.PrincetonReview.com at which users can read FAQs about the book, the survey, and the criteria for each of the ratings and rankings.