Pitt Scores in Latest Princeton Review College Guide

Issue Date: 
September 13, 2010
Pitt freshmen during this year's orientationPitt freshmen during this year's orientation

The University of Pittsburgh is ranked as one of the top two public institutions in the United States in the categories Best Quality of Life and Happiest Students in the new 2011 edition of The Princeton Review’s The Best 373 Colleges (Random House/Princeton Review).

In the Best Quality of Life category, Pitt is ranked second and Virginia Tech first among the public schools; in the Happiest Students category, Pitt is ranked second and Clemson University first among the public schools. Among all schools, public and private, Pitt is number eight in the Happiest Students category (others include Brown, Stanford, Colgate, and Yale) and number 11 in Best Quality of Life (others include Rice, Bowdoin, Washington University in St. Louis, Claremont McKenna, Middlebury, Barnard, and Smith).

According to The Princeton Review, the Best Quality of Life ranking was based on responses from students to several questions relating to “food on and off campus, dorm comfort, campus beauty, ease of getting around campus, relationship with the local community, campus safety, the surrounding area, interaction between students, friendliness and happiness of the student body, and smoothness with which the school is administered.”

The Happiest Students ranking was based on “students’ assessments of their overall happiness.” A Princeton Review news release states that the rankings are “entirely based on The Princeton Review’s survey of 122,000 students (about 325 per campus on average) attending the colleges in the book and not on The Princeton Review’s opinion of the schools.”

In its overall write-up on Pitt, The Princeton Review states that students at the University applaud the “brilliant professors doing fantastic things in their fields.” It adds comments from several students that “Administrators and professors are both surprisingly eager to involve students and are sincerely interested in our happiness and success.” … “In essence, ‘Pitt provides all the resources of a large research university (which it is), but [it] also retains a small college atmosphere with its Honors College to provide the best opportunities for its students.’ … ‘There are opportunities to do everything…for a reduced price,’ including attending professional sporting events. Moreover, ‘PITT ARTS provides…free arts activities on weekends.’ As one sophomore sums up, ‘Pitt is the smallest big school, and the campus is truly the city.’”