Chapter 1: What Are The Colleges of Distinction
Colleges of Distinctions owes its origin to parents who accompanied their children through the college-search process, who were surprised by the difficulties they encountered trying to get beyond the “brand-name” institutions to find the colleges that offered the best undergraduate educations, and then—through the next four years and beyond—were pleased to see the growth their children experienced at the “hidden-gem colleges” they had discovered. In collaboration with academic professionals, these parents have created Colleges of Distinction as a way to help students and parents find colleges they might not otherwise have considered, but which might be exactly the right college for them.
Every featured college is unique, but they all share key characteristics:
Their students are bright, motivated, and engaged.
Their classrooms are interesting, exciting places to explore and learn.
They offer their students vibrant campuses and communities
And, they turn good students into well rounded, successful citizens with the capacity to contribute to their communities, their nation, and their world.
If this sounds what you are looking for in a college, then you are the student (or parent of a perspective student) for whom we wrote this book.
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Our goal, with Colleges of Distinction, is to help you get beyond the advertisements and the rankings to find the colleges and universities that consistently provide a remarkable undergraduate college experience and produce successful graduates.
These are schools that get praise from high school guidance counselors across the country, as well as from college admissions officers, professors, students, and satisfied alumni. So why haven’t you heard of them?
The truth is, many schools are famous for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of their education programs. They may have big-time football or basketball programs. They may be known for the path-breaking research conducted by scientists who never actually teach. Or, they may be recognized for the quality of their Ph. D programs and medical schools.
The colleges in this book may not receive that kind of publicity, but employers and graduate schools know that Colleges of Distinction produce real winners.
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How do they do this?
They welcome students who demonstrate both academic promise and community involvement. They keep classes small, so professors get to know their students as individuals, not numbers. They encourage athletics and a wide range of cultural, intellectual, and social activities. But they help students keep it all in balance with their studies. They encourage their students to get involved with their own communities, as well as exposing them to the global community.
Year after year they do a great job, and looking back, their graduates say, “that might not be the right college for everyone but it was exactly right for me.”
You’ll find many small, private, liberal arts colleges in this book. Schools of this kind have long been recognized for their focus on personal attention and student engagement. There are public universities in this guide as well. Proving that these institutions can be just as personalized as their private counterparts. There are also single-gender schools, historically black colleges, engineering schools, Christian colleges, and more.
As different as these colleges may be from each other, among people “in the know” they all have outstanding national reputation. We hope you benefit from finding out more about the best-kept secrets in college education today.
Finding the right college is one of the biggest decisions you’ll ever make. It ranks right up there with choosing a spouse and deciding on a career. Finding the right college change your life: getting stuck at the wrong one can leave you frustrated and unhappy.
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How do students choose? How can parents help?
So, how do high school students select the right college? And, if you are a parent, how do you help your son or daughter make the right choice?
Let’s be realistic. It’s your junior or senior year of high school. You’re busy with your school work, concentrating on the SAT or ACT, fitting in school activities, and trying to have a social life, too. Are you likely to devote a huge number of your hours carefully reading every college’s marketing materials, pouring over piles of guidebooks, studying the characteristics of hundreds of colleges and universities, and eventually making a deliberate, well-considered decision? Of course not.
According to research by the College Board, the most important source of information for deciding which colleges to apply to is word-of-mouth information. They listen to advice from teachers and guidance counselors, parents and other family members, and—often most compellingly from their friends.
College guidebooks are another source of information, and many students and parents make good use of them.
Often, of course, this process will guide you to the right college. Yet there may be excellent schools—maybe the perfect school for you—that no one tells you about, that you haven’t heard of, and that you wont discover by scanning the top 10 colleges in an annual numerical ranking.
That’s where Colleges of Distinctions comes in.
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College Guidebooks
It’s the “best” college—or the second or third or twentieth best. It ranks at “the top of the list” and it has an “excellent reputation.”
Ever wonder what these phrases really mean? Can diverse institutions really be rank-ordered using statistics? How relevant are these measurements and to what is going to be the ideal college experience for you?
The truth is, it’s extremely difficult to quantify and qualify of colleges and universities. For one thing, the very act of measuring colleges is based on the assumption that all students are alike, that they want and need the same things, and that it might be possible to create a single ideal college that would be perfect for everyone. Of course that isn’t true.
Unlike high school, college students spend their time studying vastly different subjects. They enter college with a huge variety of expectations, hopes, and dreams. There are no SAT’s or ACT’s to measure achievement, no national “standards of learning” to compare the quality of one college with that of another. There are no published statistical measures on how happy and satisfied students are at the over 3,000 colleges in the country.
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So how do we judge quality?
The Rankings and Ratings Approach
A number of widely-read guidebooks make a game attempt at comparing schools. US News & World Report’s annual “Best Colleges” uses a statistical approach that considers many different factors, all of which, they claim contribute to the overall quality of a college. Among the factors U.S. News plugs into their statistical formula are:
The college’s overall faculty:student ratio
The number of faculty members with Ph.D.s
The size of the college’s financial endowment
Faculty salaries
SAT/ACT scores of incoming students
Percentage of entering students in the top 10% of their high school class
Level of alumni giving
Percentage of applicants rejected
Student retention and graduation rates
But can