Forbes.com Ranks Simmons College One of America’s Best Colleges For 2008

    BOSTON, Aug. 19 /EMWNews/ -- Forbes.com has ranked

Simmons College (http://www.simmons.edu) as one of "America's Best Colleges" in

its 2008 inaugural ranking of undergraduate colleges and universities.



    The list, which will be published annually, ranks 569 of the nearly

4,000 undergraduate institutions in the nation (the top 15 percent), using

methodology that the Forbes.com editors say "attempts to put itself in a

student's shoes," basing their ranking on "the quality of the education

they provide, and how much their students achieve."



    Simmons College is a small private university located in the heart of

Boston. It includes a pioneering undergraduate college for women, and

graduate programs for women and men in health sciences, social work,

management, library and information science, education, liberal arts, and

communications management.



    Forbes.com ranked schools in conjunction with the Center for College

Affordability and Productivity (CCAP) and Dr. Richard Vedder, an economist

at Ohio University.



    The CCAP staff gathered data from a variety of sources: 25 percent of

the rankings are based on student evaluations of courses and instructors

recorded on the Web site RateMyProfessors.com; and percent is based on how

many of the school's alumni, adjusted for enrollment, are listed among

notable people in "Who's Who in America."



    The other half of the ranking is based equally on three factors: the

average amount of student debt at graduation held by those who borrowed;

the percentage of students graduating in four years; and the number of

students or faculty, adjusted for enrollment, who have won nationally

competitive awards.



    While the Forbes.com editors say that "mock precision" of schools is

impossible in rankings, they say their rankings reflect, "in a very real

way, the quality and cost of an undergraduate education at a wide range of

American Colleges and universities... if a school appears on this list at

all, that indicates it meets a certain level of quality... These rankings

are an attempt to, in a modest way, alleviate the information gap and lead

to better and more informed decisions about where to go to college."