The Princeton Review recently published its annual college guide, The Best 382 Colleges. The book offers a wealth of information on the colleges and universities that the organization views as the nation’s top institutions.
The college guide also includes lists of the schools with the best food, nicest dormitories, most beautiful campus. etc. The guide also ranks students by political persuasion, drinking habits, and overall happiness.
Among the listings published in the guide are rankings for colleges and universities that have the most and the least race and class interaction. The university where students from different races and classes interacted the most is Rice University in Houston, Texas. The United States Military Academy at West Point was ranked second and the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia ranked third. Other colleges and universities in the top 10 schools with a great deal of race/class interaction among students were St. John’s College of Maryland, St. John’s College of New Mexico, the United State Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut, Webb Institute in Glen Clove, New York, Drew University in Madison, New Jersey, College of Wooster in Ohio, and Brooklyn College of the City University of New York.
Among the colleges and universities with the least race and class interaction, Providence College in Rhode Island ranked first. Colgate University in Hamilton, New York was second and Amherst College in Massachusetts was third. Amherst College frequently sits atop the rankings of the JBHE Annual Survey in the number of Black first-year students at the nation’s leading liberal arts colleges. In 2016 the college won the second annual Jack Kent Cooke Foundation prize for commitment to economic diversity. Yet according to the Princeton Review, the high degree of diversity in the student body is not matched by racial of class interaction on campus.
Other colleges and universities listed by the Princeton Reviews as having the least race/class interaction are Sonoma State University in California, Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut, Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Auburn University in Alabama, the University of Tennessee, Miami University in Ohio, and the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.
