WASHINGTON (ABP) — Three Baptist universities were listed among the top 50 national universities in a new results-based ranking by the Center for College Affordability and Productivity (CCAP), based in Washington.
The two-year-old nonprofit organization ranked Wake Forest University at 19th, Samford University at 27th and Baylor University at 34th on its list.
Rankings were released May 6 on the Forbes.com website, and are scheduled for publication in the May 19 issue of Forbes magazine.
The Center for College Affordability and Productivity is an independent, not-for-profit organization that studies higher-education issues. Rankings are based on student perceptions of the quality of courses and instructors, graduation rates and such factors as percentage of students winning nationally competitive awards.
The center also looks at the number of graduates listed in “Who's Who in America” because that publication includes undergraduate affiliations of those listed. The organization measures student evaluations posted on Ratemyprofessors.com, a 9-year-old site with 6.8 million student-generated evaluations.
Because the Center for College Affordability and Productivity is a results-based ranking, its findings often differ from other recognized college performance measures, such as the annual list produced by U.S. News & World Report.
For example, Southern Methodist University in Dallas ranked 13th on the center's list, but only made it to the 67th spot on the U.S. News list.
Wake Forest ranked 30th on the U.S. News list, with Baylor at 75th. Samford showed up at 118th.
The trio ranked among several nationally known institutions, including Rice University (24th), Carnegie Mellon University (25th), Georgetown University (26th), the University of California-Berkeley (28th), the University of Rochester (29th) and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (30th) in the CCAP listing.