Wooster achieves 2025 Best 390 Colleges distinction from Princeton Review

Again this year, The College of Wooster achieved recognition as one of the nation’s top schools by The Princeton Review in its guidebook, The Best 390 Colleges: 2025 Edition. The Princeton Review uses surveys of 168,000 students from across the country attending the colleges to make their distinctions.

While the Best Colleges guidebook does not rank the schools 1-390, it includes several ranking lists of the top 25 colleges in specific categories based on students’ answers to several questions. The College profile for Wooster includes several categories for which the College was selected including the following.

• Most Accessible Professors – No. 10
• Best Classroom Experience – No. 19
• Best Science Lab Facilities – No. 7
• Best College Library – No. 24
• Top 20 Best Schools for Internships (Private Schools) – 15

The book’s editors at The Princeton Review, call out Wooster’s strength in mentoring and opportunities for research and internships—recognizing its emphasis in reflective experiential learning. Students at Wooster surveyed cited the Independent Study program as “an opportunity to work with a faculty mentor on a project in any topic they are passionate about.” The publication added that the curriculum and support from professors “teaches students how to write exceptionally,” noting “‘Collaborative work and experience’ are stressed, and classes are set up ‘in a way that allows people to learn from their peers as well as their professors.’”

In a “Survey Says” sidebar in the book’s profile on Wooster, The Princeton Review lists topics that Wooster students surveyed were in most agreement about in their answers. The list includes “Students are happy,” “Classroom facilities are great,” “Active minority support groups,” and “Internships are widely available.” The character of Wooster’s campus community is called “friendly beyond measure” and students talked about the variety of extracurricular and co-curricular opportunities part of life on campus. They mentioned how students are involved in a variety of sports, clubs, music ensembles and groups, and other activities that suit their interests and also find many ways to celebrate school pride and Scot spirit.

The Best 390 Colleges is one of more than 150 Princeton Review books in a line published by Penguin Random House. Only about 15% of America’s 2,600 four-year colleges are profiled in the book. The Princeton Review choses the colleges for the book based on data it annually collects from surveys of 2,000 college administrators about their institutions’ academic offerings. The company also reviews data from its surveys of college students attending the schools who report on their experiences at their institutions. The annual book and its rankings have been featured on NBC’s TODAY more than two dozen times and referenced by many other media from NPR to The Wall Street Journal and The Chronicle of Higher Education. The Princeton Review is an education services company known for its tutoring, test-prep, admission services, books, and other learning resources. Headquartered in New York, New York, it is not affiliated with Princeton University.

Posted in News on September 11, 2024.