Students rank Wabash College near the top in the nation for career services, science labs, athletics, classroom experience and more. The Princeton Review’s annual report highlights 15 percent of America’s 2,500 four-year colleges.
Wabash ranked No. 2 as a jock school, No. 4 as easiest campus to get around, No. 6 for best career services, No 12 for best classroom experience, No. 15 for best athletic facilities, No. 16 for best science labs, and No. 19 for professors get high marks.
The Princeton Review's survey of 126,000 students (about 333 per campus on average) attending the colleges. The 80-question survey asks students to rate their schools on several topics and report on their campus experiences at them. Topics range from assessments of their professors as teachers to opinions about their financial aid. A new ranking list in this year's edition of the book names the schools at which students gave their school's science/lab facilities the strongest ratings.
The College has always scored high for athletics, facilities, and classroom experience. The high ranking for science labs was new this year.
“It’s really exciting to know students recognize the quality facilities that we have here,” Chemistry Professor Scott Feller said. “We have really improved all of our facilities. This has been done with an eye toward getting students hands-on use of all of our equipment. “I think that’s one of the things that defines our program. We put modern scientific instrumentation in the hands of students very early in the program. I feel very good when a student leaves here with a science degree they will have interacted with equipment that many students would not have come upon until they had finished a year or two of graduate school.
“And I’m just as proud that students who are non-majors, are going to get a chance to use instrumentation that some of their science major peers at other places might not get to ever touch.”
Director of Schroeder Center for Career Development Scott Crawford said his team has helped build the center to its current level of success.
“We have a dedicated and inventive Career Services team, including our talented Peer Career Advisors, fantastic alumni support for and participation in our efforts, and we regularly re-invent our programs and initiatives to serve ever-changing student needs and interests,” Crawford said. “We're busy creating a number of exciting programs for the coming year, and invite all students, alumni and recruiters to get involved with Career Services. If you've been waiting for the right time, there's no better time than now.”
"Wabash College offers outstanding academics, which is the primary criteria for our choice of schools for the book. We base our selections primarily on data we obtain in our annual institutional data surveys,” said Robert Franek, Princeton Review’s Senior VP/Publisher of The Best 378 Colleges. “We also take into account input we get from our staff, our 35-member National College Counselor Advisory Board, our personal visits to schools, and the wide range of feedback we get from our surveys of students attending these schools. It is their opinions that college applicants often value the most, particularly on (or in the absence of) campus visits. We also work to keep a wide representation of colleges in the book by region, size, selectivity and character."
"The Best 378 Colleges" is the 22nd edition of The Princeton Review's annual "Best Colleges" book. It is one of 150 Princeton Review books published by Random House in a line that also includes test-prep guides for the ACT, SAT, SAT Subject Tests, and AP exams, plus "The Complete Book of Colleges," and "Paying for College Without Going Broke."