Princeton Review Guidebook Cites JMU as One of 'Best 371 Colleges'

A combination of outstanding academics, great food and happy students has landed James Madison University a place in the 2010 edition of the Princeton Review's annual best colleges book. 

"The Best 371 Colleges" guide profiles about 15 percent of America's 2,500 four-year colleges and two Canadian colleges. In addition to the school profiles, the book includes ranking lists of top 20 schools in 62 categories. JMU ranks No. 4 in the Best Campus Food list - up one spot from the 2009 edition - and No. 18 in the Happiest Students category in the latest edition. 

"We commend James Madison University for its outstanding academics, which is the primary criteria for our choice of schools in the book," said Robert Franek, Princeton Review's vice president of publishing and the author of "The Best 371 Colleges. "We also work to keep a wide representation of colleges in the book by region, size, selectivity and character," he said. "We make our choices based on institutional data we gather about schools, feedback from students attending them and input from our staff who visit hundreds of colleges a year. We also value the opinions and suggestions of our 23-member National College Counselor Advisory Board and independent college counselors we hear from yearlong." 

The 62 ranking lists in "The Best 371 Colleges" are based on the Princeton Review's 80-question survey of 122,000 students attending the colleges in the book. According to the Princeton Review, a college's appearance on a ranking list is "entirely the result of a high consensus among its surveyed students about a topic compared with that of students at other schools answering the same survey question(s) on the ranking list topic. 

The annual guidebook went on sale July 28.