Wabash College has scored near the top of The Princeton Review’s college ratings in its 2010 edition of its guidebook, The Best 371 Colleges.
Wabash scored in the top percentiles in academic rankings, financial aid, accessibility to professors, and student involvement in athletics.
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.
“We commend Wabash College for its outstanding academics, which is the primary criteria for our choice of schools for the book,” said Robert Franek, Princeton Review’s V.P. of Publishing and author of the guide.
“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.”
The Review’s ratings fall in a range of 60-99 points. Wabash scored very well with an academic rating of 98, accessibility of professors a 99, and professors being interesting at 98. In other areas measured in the Review’s surveys, Wabash scored a 90 on quality of life.
In the “students say” category Wabash scored in the top ten in "Most Accessible Professors" (3rd), "Everyone Plays Intramural Sports" (3rd), "best athletic facilities" (4th), "Jock Schools" (4th), and "School Runs Like Butter" (8th).
The students rated Wabash in the top 20 in "Students Pack the Stadiums" (10th), "Great Financial Aid" (14th), and "Professors Get High Marks" (16th).
The survey also reflected student opinions that “lab facilities are great, athletic facilities are great, career services are great, school is well run, everyone loves the Little Giants, frats dominate social scene.”
The Review said, “Wabash is one of the few remaining all-male colleges in the country, and like the rest it has a small applicant pool. The pool is highly self-selected, and the academic standards for admission, while selective, aren’t especially demanding. Graduating is a whole other matter. Don’t consider applying if you aren’t ready to do grueling work required for success here.”
The schools profiled 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.
Earlier this summer Wabash College was named as one of 44 Fiske Guide "Best Buy" colleges in the nation.