Seeking "great financial aid," "best campus food" and "students who love their sports teams?" According to The Princeton Review, the University of Dayton, a "best value college" and "a college that creates futures," might just be your ideal choice.
The University of Dayton lands on The Princeton Review's top 25 lists for those five categories, plus received recognition in the "Best Midwest," "Top Entrepreneurship" and "Green Colleges" categories in The Princeton Review's The Best 392 Colleges: 2027 Edition.
"The colleges we profile in The Best 392 Colleges vary by type, size, locale and campus culture. In our opinion, each one offers an academically outstanding undergraduate education," said Rob Franek, lead author of the book and editor-in-chief at The Princeton Review. "They are truly a select group: they comprise only about 14% of America's nearly 2,800 four-year colleges."
"The colleges that make our ranking lists in the book do so entirely as a result of their own students' opinions of them. We don't rank the schools on a single hierarchical list, nor have we ever crowned one college 'best' overall. No school is best overall. For 35 years, our goal for this project has been to create multiple ranking lists and resources to help college applicants answer what is likely the toughest but also the most important question in their journey to college: 'Which college is best for me?'"
Here are some of the things students told The Princeton Review:
- There are many reasons to attend the University of Dayton, but the one mentioned above all is its experiential learning. "We have opportunities for real world experience in every major" (and sometimes even further independent expertises by department), like "the Sophomore Experience Entrepreneurship Program that gives students a $5,000 grant to run their own microbusiness." Engineers have space, time, and resources to build rigs and run experiments, "the music program is phenomenal," and minicourses in subjects like microeconomics utilize the Dayton area to show "the interaction between economics and the environment through outdoor excursions that were often very informative." All of this is backstopped by the professors, to whom students give high marks. “Most of my professors have been extremely nice, approachable, and engaging.” They “challenge you but also really want you to succeed, especially if you participate in discussions and provide quality work on assignments and exams.” Indeed, “they want to show each student that they have potential to be great, but they have to unlock it.”
- Undergrads at the University of Dayton overwhelmingly agree that their peers are "very sweet," and "super welcoming and approachable" people who foster a strong sense of community and school spirit. Given the "relatively small class sizes, it's easy to get to know a lot of people in your major" and others more simply describe it as common to see "strangers quickly become friends and friends become like family."
- Moreover, students feel strongly about inclusion, noting that “students never need to be told to work together to create a safe and inclusive campus, they just do.”
Annually published since 1992, The Princeton Review's Best Colleges guide profiles schools the company's editors deem the nation's best based on the opinions of the company's college experts and data from its surveys of college administrators and students attending the schools. The profiles present information on admission and aid requirements, acceptance rates, enrollment, accepted students' test scores and student body demographics. The book's 50 ranking lists each name the top 25 colleges in a specific category. They are entirely based on data from the company's 98-question survey of students attending the schools in the book. Read the University's full profile on The Princeton Review.