News
Southwestern Ranks among Forbes’s Top Colleges 2019
August 16, 2019
August 16, 2019
Open gallery
Forbes has released their 12th annual ranking of America’s Top Colleges, and Southwestern University tops the list of small private liberal-arts colleges in Texas. The publication’s editors also recognize SU as #10 among small colleges in the South and #7 among private colleges in Texas.
“Forbes’s college ranking is distinguished by its consumer-centric approach,” says Caroline Howard, director of editorial operations. “The evaluation of the 650 undergraduate institutions is based exclusively on the quality of the education they provide, the experiences of the students, and their postgraduate success and financial well-being.”
SU also maintains its place as the #1 small private liberal-arts college in Texas in the publication’s proprietary Grateful Grads Index, moving up nationally from #92 to #86. Forbes’s Grateful Grads Index lists “the happiest, most successful alumni” among private, nonprofit institutions for annual giving, forgoing other return-on-investment (ROI) metrics, such as alumni employment and salary statistics. Instead, the company focuses on “the seven-year median gifts per full-time enrolled student and the average percentage of alumni who give back.” The former data are derived from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) and the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES); the latter come from the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education (CASE). The alumni participation rate measures only gifts made to the University and not other forms of engagement, such as volunteering.
Thank you to our proud alumni!