Welch College received notification that the institution was for the first time ranked among “A+ Schools for B Students,” along with only two other schools in its category, “Regional Colleges South”—High Point University and Ouachita Baptist University. Sixteen other schools nationwide in the “Regional Colleges” category received this designation.
This year Welch ranked 18th among “Regional Colleges South” in U.S. News & World Report’s 2021 edition of America’s Best Colleges rankings, according to Welch president Matt Pinson. The “Best Regional Colleges” category where Welch is ranked includes 350 institutions that focus on undergraduate education and offer a range of degree programs in the traditional liberal arts as well as in professional fields such as business, nursing, and education. Colleges in this category are ranked within four geographic regions: North, South, Midwest, and West.
U.S. News rankings offer opportunities to judge the relative quality of institutions based on widely-accepted indicators of excellence: peer assessment, graduation and retention rates, faculty resources, student selectivity, financial resources, alumni giving, and more.
“We are delighted about this high ranking in U.S. News and World Report’s Best Colleges, and especially excited about the new ‘A+ Schools for B Students’ ranking,” Pinson said. “It shows our quality to prospective students and their parents, as well as to alumni and supporters. It shows that academic excellence can coexist with a strong commitment to Christian faith and life as the center of the Welch College experience.”
“The first time Welch appeared in this ranking, back in 2010, we ranked 54th,” Pinson mentioned. “And even that was in the top half of all the Southern schools ranked in the Best Regional Colleges category. So in eleven years we’ve gone from 54th to our ranking of 18th for 2021. To put this in perspective, the next ten colleges in the list that Welch outranked had an average enrollment more than five times our enrollment and an average endowment almost nine times our endowment.”
Welch received especially high marks in five strategic areas. Compared to the other 121 institutions in the Regional Colleges South category, Welch ranked:
#2 in student-faculty ratio
#3 in students who were in the top 25% of their high school graduating class
#5 in the percentage of classes under 20 students
#5 in graduation rate
#8 in first-year student retention rate
#8 in alumni giving rate
Welch Provost Matthew McAffee said, “We’re excited to see Welch College perform so strongly in yet another U.S. News & World Report. We hope this measure will continue to show current and future students that Welch is committed to quality and excellence as a Christian institution of higher learning.”
More information is available about the rankings and methodology in the annual America’s Best Colleges guidebook at: www.usnews.com/collegemeth. For more information about Welch, email gotowelch@welch.edu or visit www.welch.edu.