Survey: BC has loyal sports fans, lacks diversity
Upon hearing Boston College ranked ninth in the “Students Pack the Stadiums” category and 14th in “Great College Towns” category of the Princeton Review’s annual nationwide survey, college spokesman Jack Dunn said he was not surprised.
“The students at Boston College are great fans and Boston College is in America’s best college town,” he said.
However, Dunn described the school’s position at 17th in the “Little Race/Class Interaction” category as “an unfair depiction of Boston College.”
“We don’t focus on the rankings, and we encourage students to use them as nothing more than a tool in their discernment process,” he said.
Because the review relies on student surveys, Dunn said it can be considered as “less scientific and perhaps less accurate than other [college] ranking agents,” such as Forbes Magazine, Business Week and the US News and World Report, “which have specific measurement categories.”
Boston Magazine once described the school’s student body as “a J. Crew catalog with a slight hangover.”
“There are a lot of preppy people at our school,” said one B.C. student anonymously surveyed by the Princeton Review. “Girls usually wear skirts and Uggs (unless it's freezing out, but it has to be very, very cold), and boys usually wear jeans and T-shirts or collared cotton shirts.”
“The typical B.C. student is white, Catholic, usually from the Northeast, [and] probably had family who went to B.C.,” said another student.
The Princeton Review, which has published its college guide annually since 1992, released its assessment of colleges across the United States this week, ranking the top 20 schools in 62 different categories.
The college was also named to the “Best Northeastern Colleges” and “Best 371 Colleges” lists.
The category rankings are based on an 80-question survey completed by about 122,000 students – 325 per campus on average – at the 371 schools in the book during the 2008-09 school year and/or the previous two school years. The surveys, most of which were completed online, ask students about their school's academics, administration, campus life, student body, and themselves.
The Princeton Review is an education services company headquartered in Framingham. It is not affiliated with Princeton University, and it is not a magazine.
For more information on the 2010 edition of “The Best 371 Colleges,” go here.
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