Thomas Aquinas College on top 10 list
Santa Paula Times
5/9/07
Thomas Aquinas College is the nation’s #5 best value among
private colleges according to The Princeton Review. The New York-based
education services company names the school on its ranking list
of “Top 10 Best Value Private Colleges” in the new 2008
edition of its book, America’s Best Value Colleges (Random
House / Princeton Review, $18.95), which goes on sale Tuesday, April
24, 2007.
From the 650 colleges and universities it researched, the guide
chose to feature 165 institutions for their excellent academics,
generous financial aid packages and/or relatively low costs of attendance.
Thomas Aquinas College is the only Catholic institution in the country
ranked in the “Top 10 Best Value” category, and it is
one of only two private California institutions to make the list,
along with Scripps College. The company today posted a list of the
schools in the book at www.princetonreview.com/college/research/bestvalue/bestvalue.asp.
In the narrative profile on Thomas Aquinas College, The Princeton
Review’s editors commend the school saying, “This isn’t
your standard college.... Students take their faith and their intellectual
life very seriously.... The College’s curriculum focuses on
the study of the Great Books....that have shaped the development
of Western thought: Aristotle, Homer, Euclid, T.S. Eliot, Albert
Einstein, and, of course, St. Thomas Aquinas himself.” They
go on to say that “Some types of financial aid available at
other schools are not available here because the college receives
no federal campus-based funds or contracts. To compensate, the college
has its own aid program funded through generous contributions from
benefactors,” and students are “overall, very satisfied
with both the high quality of the education and the level of assistance
they receive to help cover it.”
The Princeton Review selected its “best values” based
on data it obtained from administrators at more than 650 colleges
during the 2005-06 academic year, and its surveys of students attending
the schools. “We considered over 30 factors to identify our
‘best value’ colleges,” says Robert Franek, The Princeton
Review’s Vice President for Publishing. “They covered
four areas: Academics, Tuition GPA (the sticker price minus average
amount students receive in scholarships and grants), Financial Aid
(how well colleges meet students’ financial need), and Student
Borrowing. The 90 public and 75 private colleges we chose for this
edition offer a terrific education, plus they have impressive records
of meeting students’ needs for financial aid. We highly recommend
them as America’s best college education deals for 2007.”
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