NetNews

St. Lawrence is included in two of most well-known guides to college that make the newsstands -- and the news reports -- each fall.

The annual rankings of colleges by U.S. News and World Report have changed somewhat from previous years. This year, the magazine and associated guidebook altered its methodology by no longer calculating yield (the percentage of accepted students who choose to matriculate) and has changed its presentation style by eliminating a demarcation between the ranked Top 50 Colleges and the alphabetized Tier II. Instead, the two categories are merged and all 110 colleges that formerly were in the Top 50 and Tier II are rank-ordered. Tier III and Tier IV, in alphabetical order, still exist. The new category is titled "Liberal Arts Colleges -- Bachelor's (Nationally) Top Schools" and St. Lawrence is among its peers at Number 62. The overall raw score is 60 out of a possible 100.

The Best 351 Colleges, by The Princeton Review, also includes St. Lawrence. The University has been named one of the "Best in the Northeast," one of 135 schools profiled in the first edition of The Best Northeastern Colleges; this volume is one of five in its regional guidebook series. The publishers' stated goal is: to identify some of the colleges and universities that they feel stand out within each region and, in particular, to raise awareness of many schools that are less well-known outside of their region. The methodology involves asking students to complete a survey about once every three years. In this year's edition of The Best 351 Colleges, St. Lawrence is Number 10 (out of 20) on the list in the Academics category called "Their Students Never Stop Studying."

The entire list:
1. California Institute of Technology
2. Haverford
3. Carnegie Mellon
4. Swarthmore
5. Wesleyan College
6. Scripps College
7. Worcester Polytechnic Institute
8. Colorado College
9. Knox College
10. St. Lawrence University
11. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
12. Colorado School of Mines
13. Earlham
14. Bard
15. Virginia Tech
16. Davidson
17. Ohio Wesleyan
18. Beloit
19. Marquette University
20. Austin College

Posted: August 27, 2003