WB Again Rated Among Top Ten Colleges in 2005 by U.S. News and World Report

For a third consecutive year, Western Baptist College has been rated by U.S. News and World Report magazine among the Top Ten Comprehensive Colleges-Bachelors in the west.  In the annual 2005 rankings, Western Baptist is rated eighth overall in the West Region in its category.

A private, Christian college with an enrollment of 740 students, Western Baptist also improved its ranking for Best Value in the West from ninth to seventh and is the only Christian college on the West coast in the top ten.   WB has also been rated among the top 25 percent of similar colleges nationally.

Western Baptist also rated as having the sixth highest graduation rate for colleges in the West Region and is among the top-20 for the highest proportion of classes (68%) with less than 20 students as the faculty to student ratio is 15 to 1.

"We're very pleased and honored to be rated in the top ten again this year," said Dr. Bryce Bernard, Western Baptist's vice president for academics. "While these rankings are important and they do provide benchmarks for our institution, we are most proud of our graduates and the tremendous impact they have in their local communities."

There are 324 Comprehensive Colleges-Bachelors ranked within four national regions. The Western Region includes 15 states, including college-laden Texas.

The institutions rated as "best values" are schools that are academically above average and cost considerably less than many other schools when the financial aid (need-based grants) that they dispensed is taken into account.   These 324 colleges focus on undergraduate education and a wider range of degree programs, but grant fewer than 50 percent of their degrees in liberal arts disciplines.  This category includes institutions where at least 10 percent of the undergraduate degrees awarded are bachelors.

The U.S. News rankings are based on several key measures of quality and are used to evaluate the various dimensions of academic quality at each college. These measures fall into seven broad categories: peer assessment; graduation and retention rate; faculty resources; student selectivity; financial resources; alumni giving; and, only for national universities and liberal arts colleges, graduation rate performance.

These rankings are based on three variables:

     > The ratio of quality to price.  A school's quality ranking--its overall score in the 2005 America's Best Colleges rankings-was divided by the cost to an average student there receiving a grant meeting his or her financial need during the 2003-04 academic year.  The higher the ratio of quality ranking to the discounted cost, the better the value.
     > The percentage of all undergraduates receiving grants meeting financial need during the 2003-04 academic year.            > The percentage of a school's total costs covered by the average need-based grant to undergraduates during the 2003-04 academic year.

Based on their nonpartisan view of what matters in education, the U.S. News two-pillar ranking system relies on quantitative measures that education experts have proposed as reliable indicators of academic quality.  Schools are first categorized by mission and, in some cases, by region.  The magazine's report also gathers data from each college on up to 16 indicators of academic excellence which include input measures that reflect a school's student body, its faculty, and its financial resources, and outcome measures that signal how well the institution does its job of educating students.