September 04, 2019

Susquehanna University is listed again in the Wall Street Journal/Times Higher Education (WSJ/THE) ranking of the nation’s top colleges and universities.

The university ranks No. 80 out of the 258 northeastern schools that were profiled.

Susquehanna has been listed in the ranking, which primarily measures student success and learning, every year since its inception in 2017. The university’s nationwide rank is No. 208 out of the 801 schools that made the list.

The WSJ/THE rankings emphasize how well a college prepares students for life after graduation. The overall ranking is based on 15 factors across four categories: 40 percent of each school’s overall score comes from student outcomes; including a measure of graduate salaries; 30 percent from the resources a school devotes to academics; 20 percent from how well it engages its students; and 10 percent from the diversity of its students and staff.

Susquehanna ranks at 225 in terms of outcomes, which measures graduate salaries, graduation rate, graduates’ abilities to repay student debt and academic reputation.

The university places 219 in terms of resources, which measures how much money each university spends on teaching per student, the ratio of students to faculty members and the number of published scholarly research papers per faculty.

The rankings include 170,000 students’ responses to survey questions, including how challenging they find their classes, how often faculty encourage them to apply classroom instruction to the real world, and whether they have opportunities to collaborate with classmates.

A full methodology can be found here, along with the complete list of schools.

Data comes from a variety of sources, including the U.S. government (Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System or IPEDS), the U.S. Department of Education’s Federal Student Aid center, the College Scorecard, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Times Higher Education’s U.S. Student and Academic surveys, and the Elsevier bibliometric dataset.

Susquehanna is regularly ranked as one of the best small liberal arts universities in the country. The university has also been included in prestigious rankings from The Princeton Review, Washington Monthly, Money Magazine, Kipplinger’s and Zippia.