29 Pennsylvania Colleges Make Princeton Review's 2022 'Best' List

PENNSYLVANIA — 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 Temple University and Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania.

Overall, 29 Pennsylvania 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 Pennsylvania colleges named among the country's best by Princeton Review:

• Allegheny College: 1,667 students enrolled
• Bryn Mawr College: 1,301 students enrolled
• Bucknell University: 3,695 students enrolled
• Carnegie Mellon University: 7,073 students enrolled
• Dickinson College: 1,932 students enrolled
• Drexel University: 14,555 students enrolled
• Duquesne University: 5,383 students enrolled
• Franklin & Marshall College: 2,254 students enrolled
• Gettysburg College: 2,505 students enrolled
• Grove City College: 2,277 students enrolled
• Haverford College: 1,307 students enrolled
• Indiana University of Pennsylvania: 8,010 students enrolled
• Juniata College: 1,340 students enrolled
• Lafayette College: 2,514 students enrolled
• Lehigh University: 5,203 students enrolled
• Lycoming College: 1,067 students enrolled
• Moravian University: 1,997 students enrolled
• Muhlenberg College: 1,940 students enrolled
• Penn State University Park: 39,809 students enrolled
• Saint Joseph’s University: 4,783 students enrolled
• Susquehanna University: 2,323 students enrolled
• Swarthmore College: 1,437 students enrolled
• Temple University: 27,306 students enrolled
• University of Pennsylvania: 9,872 students enrolled
• University of Pittsburgh - Pittsburgh Campus: 19,197 students enrolled
• University of Scranton: 3,658 students enrolled
• Ursinus College: 1,493 students enrolled
• Villanova University: 7,037 students enrolled
• Washington & Jefferson College: 1,166 students enrolled

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.