MHC Featured in 2010 Princeton Review Guide
July 29, 2009
Mount Holyoke College is one of the country's best institutions for undergraduate education, according to The Princeton Review Guide's 2010 edition of its annual guidebook, The Best 371 Colleges (Random House), published July 28.
Mount Holyoke was once again rated highly in the categories of "best classroom experience" (#6), "best college library" (#12), race and class interaction (#9), acceptance of the gay community (#10), "most beautiful campus" (#3), and "dorms like palaces" (#13).
The school profiles featured in The Best 371 Colleges also include school ratings, with numerical scores on a scale of 60 to 99, based largely on school-reported data collected during the 2008-2009 academic year. Mount Holyoke earned a rating of 98 in academics, selectivity, and financial aid, and a 90 for the quality of campus life.
In its profile on Mount Holyoke, The Princeton Review Guide quotes extensively from MHC students surveyed for the book. Those students spoke frequently about the College's "great lab facilities," the safe feel of the campus, "dorms like palaces," and the popularity of political activism and musical organizations.
With students from throughout the United States and nearly 70 countries, Mount Holyoke is a multicultural community. One in every three MHC students is an international citizen or African American, Asian American, Latina, Native American, or multiracial. Mount Holyoke's faculty and staff speak more than 50 languages.
The Princeton Review Guide's 62 ranking lists in The Best 371 Colleges are entirely based on its survey of 122,000 students (about 325 per campus on average) attending the colleges in the book. The 80-question survey asks students to rate their schools on several topics and report on their campus experiences. Topics range from student assessments of their professors, administrators, financial aid, and campus food, to race/class relations, gay community acceptance, and other aspects of campus life.
"We commend Mount Holyoke for its outstanding academics, which is the primary criteria for our choice of schools for the book," said Robert Franek, Princeton Review's vice president of publishing and author of The Best 371 Colleges. "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. We also value the opinions and suggestions of our 23-member National College Counselor Advisory Board, and independent college counselors we hear from yearlong."
Only about 15 percent of America's 2,500 four-year colleges and two Canadian colleges are included in the book. The Princeton Review is a New York-based company known for its test preparation, education, and college admission services. It is not affiliated with Princeton University.
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