Wagner College is listed in the Princeton Review’s 2014 “Best 378 Colleges” guide for the tenth year in a row. The annual guide will be released on Tuesday, Aug. 6.
The Princeton Review also ranked the Wagner College Theatre program #2 among college theater programs nationwide; only Pittsburgh’s Carnegie-Mellon University ranked higher. Wagner came ahead of Yale, Northwestern, Bennington, Sarah Lawrence, Skidmore, Oberlin and twelve other collegiate theater programs on the Princeton Review’s Best College Theater list. This is the tenth year in a row that Wagner College has been ranked on the Best Theater list.
Wagner College was also listed on two of the Princeton Review’s “Great Schools” lists — for Health Services majors, and for Education majors. The “Great Schools” rosters, covering 16 different majors, first appeared in 2007. Wagner College has been listed on the “Education Majors” roster every year since it first appeared. We appeared on the “Health Services Majors” roster for the first time last year. This year, both the Health Services and Education majors “Great Schools” rosters include about 40 colleges and universities nationwide.
Only about 15 percent of America’s 2,500 four-year colleges and three colleges outside the U.S.A. are profiled in the “Best 378 Colleges” book, which is the Princeton Review's flagship college guide. It includes detailed profiles of the colleges with rating scores for all schools in eight categories, based on the Princeton Review’s surveys of students attending the colleges.
“We commend Wagner College for outstanding academics, which are the primary criteria for our selection of schools for the book,” says Robert Franek, Princeton Review's publisher and author of “The Best 378 Colleges.” “Our choices are based on institutional data we collect about schools, our visits to schools over the years, feedback we gather from students attending the schools, and the opinions of our staff and our 30-member National College Counselor Advisory Board. We also work to keep a wide representation of colleges in the book by region, size, selectivity and character.”
“It is always gratifying to have our work recognized by independent organizations,” said Wagner President Richard Guarasci. “This is once again a tribute to the hard work of our faculty, students and the staff members who support them.”
In its profile on Wagner, the Princeton Review quotes extensively from students surveyed for the book. Wagner students describe the college as a “tight-knit and fun, yet academically challenging” liberal arts school. The school is “in the perfect location with a surplus of unique resources” and is composed of “an excellent and vibrant community that supports its students every step of the way.” The “commitment of the faculty and staff have for the student body is outstanding.” Students universally agree that Wagner “lets you experience all different types of subjects by following the concept: learning by doing.”
The Princeton Review does not rank the colleges in the book academically or from 1 to 378 in any category. Instead, it reports in the book 62 ranking lists of “Top 20” colleges in various categories. The lists are entirely based on the Princeton Review's survey of 122,000 students (about 324 per campus, on average) attending the colleges in the book, and not on the Princeton Review's opinion of the schools. The 80-question survey asks students to rate their own schools on several topics and report on their campus experiences at them. Topics range from assessments of their professors to opinions about their financial aid and campus food.