U.S. News, Princeton Review Honor SSU

SALISBURY, MD--Parents who elected to send their child to Salisbury State University should be smiling ear-to ear this week. Two national publications hitting the newsstands have ranked the Eastern Shore campus as one of the best in the country.

Today the prestigious Princeton Review guide, The Best 331 Colleges, ranked SSU as one of the top universities in the nation. This comes just after U.S. News & World Report ranked SSU among the top 10 public regional campuses in the North. This is the third year in a row SSU has made the U.S. News list."Career-minded students on and about the Delmarva Peninsula would be hard-pressed to find a better bargain than Salisbury State University," said the Review. "As a part of the new wave of public institutions of higher learning focusing their energies on undergraduate research, Salisbury State has seen its admission standards and the quality of its freshman class steadily improve in the past few years."

The Princeton Review both solidifies the University's growing reputation, and more. Published since 1992, the annually updated book is a national guide to colleges and universities The Princeton Review considers "the cream of the crop," said Jeanne Krier, publicist for Random House, which publishes the Review. Less than 10 percent of America's 3,500 colleges are in it. In addition to presenting two-page profiles of each institution, the book also features "straight from the campus" feedback about the college to give readers an inside prespective on what students say about it. This input is derived from The Princeton Reviews survey of 59,000 college students who anonymously evaluate their own colleges and report on aspects of campus life.

Student academic profile is also one of the measurements used by U.S. News. The superior SAT scores of SSU students (median 1030-1200) and high percentage of full-time faculty helped to place the campus among the Top 10 public universities in the North. Other criteria included reputation, retention and graduation rates, class size and alumni giving.

U.S. News divided the country into four regions with Top 10 lists in each for region publics. Over 500 regional universities were evaluated nationwide, placing SSU in the top 8 percent.

Ratings add to the reputation of a school, which in turn makes its diploma more valuable in the market place and in competition for graduate school, said officials at U.S. News-- perhaps the best news for parents and students seeking value.