11 MD Colleges Make Princeton Review’s Best List For 2022

MARYLAND —The Princeton Review has released its 30th annual list of the country's best colleges. The 2022 list, which features 387 schools, includes 11 in Maryland.

The colleges were selected based on feedback collected through student surveys and other data.

Due to the coronavirus pandemic, however, The Princeton Review took a different approach with the 2022 edition. Rather than just survey students to determine which schools would be named to this year’s “Top 20” lists, the publication instead curated more than two dozen “Great Lists,” which focus on topics that have become increasingly important to college applicants and parents searching for the right colleges.

“With most students attending college remotely this past year due to COVID, we knew it would be impossible to survey them about their on-campus experiences — from how they rated their college library to their campus food,” Rob Franek, editor-in-chief of The Princeton Review and author of the 2022 list, said in a news release. “The majority of them were dining in their family dining rooms, not their campus dining halls.”

The collection of “Great Lists” recognizes the best colleges in several areas, including financial aid, professors and overall classroom experience.

Here are the Maryland colleges named among the country's best by the Princeton Review; they are not put in any order but are listed alphabetically by location:

• St. John's College, Annapolis
• United States Naval Academy, Annapolis
• University of Maryland, Baltimore County
• Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore
• Loyola University Maryland, Baltimore
• Washington College, Chestertown
• University of Maryland, College Park
• Salisbury University, Salisbury
• St. Mary's College of Maryland, St. Mary's City
• Goucher College, Towson
• McDaniel College, Westminster

When compiling the “Great Lists,” authors discovered a few interesting facts about U.S. colleges:

• Fifty-six percent of the 387 colleges in the book were included in one or more of the 26 categories of “Great Lists.” Seventy-two percent of the schools are private, while the rest are public colleges.

• Four schools made 11 “Great Lists,” including Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California; Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, Needham, Massachusetts; Rice University, Houston, Texas; and Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.

• Among the 11 schools named to eight or more lists, the categories in which the schools commonly appeared are Great Financial Aid, Students Love These Colleges, Great Quality of Life, and Great Professors.

In conjunction with the reveal of the 2022 “Best Of” list, The Princeton Review also released the findings of a survey sent to 655 college administrators. Questions on the survey ranged from fall reopenings to COVID-19 protocols to enrollment forecasts and more.

A release on the survey findings is posted on The Princeton Review’s website.

The full list of "The Best 387 Colleges: 2022 Edition" is also available online.