14 NC Colleges Make Princeton Review’s 2022 ‘Best’ List

NORTH CAROLINA — The Princeton Review on Tuesday released its annual list of the country's best colleges. Included on this year’s list, which features 387 schools, are Wake Forest University and Davidson College in North Carolina.

Overall, 14 North Carolina schools made it onto the 30th annual list, which is published and sold in book form. Colleges that make the list do so based on feedback collected through student surveys and other data.

Due to the coronavirus pandemic, however, The Princeton Review took a different approach with the 2022 edition. Rather than just survey students to determine which schools would be named to this year’s “Top 20” lists, the publication instead curated more than two dozen “Great Lists,” which focus on topics that have become increasingly important to college applicants and parents searching for the right colleges.

“With most students attending college remotely this past year due to COVID, we knew it would be impossible to survey them about their on-campus experiences — from how they rated their college library to their campus food,” Rob Franek, editor-in-chief of The Princeton Review and author of the 2022 list, said in a news release. “The majority of them were dining in their family dining rooms, not their campus dining halls.”

The collection of “Great Lists” recognizes the best colleges in several areas, including financial aid, professors and overall classroom experience.

In addition to surveying students, The Princeton Review curated the "Great Lists" by doing a deep dive through the book's previous rankings. Selections were based on three criteria: the number of times a college appeared on a list and how recent its last appearance was; its numerical rank when on a list; and the overall consistency of feedback from surveyed students in a given category.

Each “Great List” includes anywhere from 16 to 29 schools. Schools are not ranked; instead, they appear in alphabetical order.

The final 387 schools included in the 2022 edition represent each school that appears on a “Great List.”

Here are the North Carolina colleges named among the country's best by Princeton Review:

• Appalachian State University, Boone, NC — 18,061 full-time enrollment
• Catawba College, Salisbury, NC — 1,331 full-time enrollment
• Davidson College, Davidson, NC — 1,810 full-time enrollment
• Duke University, Durham, NC — 6,682 full-time enrollment
• East Carolina University, Greenville, NC — 23,056 full-time enrollment
• Elon University, Elon, NC — 6,291 full-time enrollment
• Guilford College, Greensboro, NC — 1,674 full-time enrollment
• High Point University, High Point, NC — 4.628 full-time enrollment
• North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC — 26,150 full-time enrollment
• University of North Carolina at Asheville, Asheville, NC — 3,358 full-time enrollment
• University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC — 19,399 full-time enrollment
• University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, NC — 15,995 full-time enrollment
• Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, NC — 5,441 full-time enrollment
• Warren Wilson College, Asheville, NC

When compiling the “Great Lists,” authors discovered a few interesting facts about U.S. colleges:

• Fifty-six percent of the 387 colleges in the book were included in one or more of the 26 categories of “Great Lists.” Seventy-two percent of the schools are private, while the rest are public colleges.

• Four schools made 11 “Great Lists,” including Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California; Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, Needham, Massachusetts; Rice University, Houston, Texas; and Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.

• Among the 11 schools named to eight or more lists, the categories in which the schools commonly appeared are Great Financial Aid, Students Love These Colleges, Great Quality of Life, and Great Professors.

In conjunction with the reveal of the 2022 “Best Of” list, The Princeton Review also released the findings of a survey sent to 655 college administrators. Questions on the survey ranged from fall reopenings to COVID-19 protocols to enrollment forecasts and more.

A release on the survey findings is posted on The Princeton Review’s website.

The full list of "The Best 387 Colleges: 2022 Edition" is also available online.