According to U.S. News & World Report, ten universities and colleges in New Jersey are among the best in the country with one ranked number one for the past 12 years.
Our family is going through the college decision making process for the second time, this time with two at once. My oldest made it easy because he knew exactly which university he wanted to attend. There was no comparing schools or long distance college visits. My twins are a bit different. Neither one of them has decided where they want to go, we’ve been on multiple long distance college visits, and they’ve just begun their senior year of high school.
Going through the U.S. News & World Report list of top universities and colleges in the country was very helpful. They examined fifteen hundred colleges and universities that offer bachelor’s degrees and conducted “17 measures of academic quality.”
U.S. News & World Report does a great job of breaking down each school by “rankings data and key characteristics about majors, campus life, costs of attending, and more.” The result of their study comes from years of research using both past and current data.
Some of the ranking factors were graduation and retention rates, social mobility, graduation rate performance, undergraduate academic reputation, and faculty resources. The faculty resources from last year were examined in the following categories… class size index, faculty compensation, percent full time and part time faculty with terminal degree in their field, percent faculty that is full time, and student faculty ratio.
The New Jersey colleges and universities that landed in the top one hundred on the list are Princeton, Rutgers-New Brunswick, Rutgers-Newark, Rutgers-Camden, Stevens Institute of Technology, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Seton Hall University, Stockton University, Montclair State University, and Rowan University. One of them topped the list for the 12th year in a row. Here’s the run down of all the New Jersey schools that made the list and where they ranked in no particular order.