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Forbes.Com Ranks Simmons College One of "America's Best Colleges 2008"

BOSTON (August 19, 2008) — Forbes.com has ranked Simmons College as one of "America's Best Colleges 2008" in its inaugural ranking of undergraduate colleges and universities.

The list, which will be published annually, ranks 569 of the nearly 4,000 undergraduate institutions in the nation (the top 15%), using methodology that the Forbes.com editors say "attempts to put itself in a student's shoes," basing their ranking on "the quality of the education they provide, and how much their students achieve."

Simmons College is a small private university located in the heart of Boston.  It includes a pioneering undergraduate college for women, and graduate programs for women and men in health sciences, social work, management, library and information science, education, liberal arts, and communications management.

Forbes.com ranked schools in conjunction with the Center for College Affordability and Productivity (CCAP) and Dr. Richard Vedder, an economist at Ohio University.

The CCAP staff gathered data from a variety of sources:  25% of the rankings are based on student evaluations of courses and instructors recorded on the Web site RateMyProfessors.com; and 25% is based on how many of the school's alumni, adjusted for enrollment, are listed among notable people in "Who's Who in America."

The other half of the ranking is based equally on three factors:  the average amount of student debt at graduation held by those who borrowed; the percentage of students graduating in four years; and the number of students or faculty, adjusted for enrollment, who have won nationally competitive awards.

While the Forbes.com editors say that  "mock precision" of schools is impossible in rankings, they say their rankings reflect, "in a very real way, the quality and cost of an undergraduate education at a wide range of American Colleges and universities…if a school appears on this list at all, that indicates it meets a certain level of quality…These rankings are an attempt to, in a modest way, alleviate the information gap and lead to better and more informed decisions about where to go to college."

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