Since 2002, Niche – a company headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania – has devoted its resources to ranking and reviewing K-12 schools, colleges, cities, neighborhoods and companies across the United States in dozens of categories based on test scores, resident feedback and other data.
So it was quite the honor when www.niche.com recently ranked William Carey University as No. 2 on its “Best Colleges in Mississippi” list, which compared colleges and universities both large and small, public and private, church-affiliated and secular. With this most recent ranking, the university moves up one spot from last year’s No. 3 ranking.
“We are most definitely excited about it,” William Carey president Ben Burnett said. “If anybody knows me well, they know I want to be number one at anything, but for us to move up into second place, we’re very excited.
“It’s a testament to the hard work of the faculty and staff over the last couple of decades. William Carey has been picking up steam with the addition of programs and the addition of campuses, and rebuilding after the storms. So there’s just a lot of momentum that has been picked up over the last couple of decades, so I’m proud of the faculty and staff for their work to get us to this point.”
Niche uses data from the U.S. Department of Education to rank education providers from individual K-12 schools and school districts to four-year colleges and universities. This year’s results considered more than 1,000 top colleges and universities in the U.S.
Factors included in Niche’s analysis included academic strength, professors, value for cost, campus life, athletics, diversity, student life, dorms, dining and location.
“This organization, which is a very reputable ranking organization, looks at professors; they look at student life on campus, so those things we are trying to increase and work on,” Burnett said. “We feel like we have a great faculty on our campuses that really get to know our students, and not just teach them in masses, but get to know them.
“In my tenure (as president) in the last two years, we have really concentrated on affordability aspects, and on the ranking aspects it shows that. You can see how much more affordable William Carey is than even some of our public institutions in Mississippi. And we’ve been pushing really hard for undergraduate improvement on the campus – our undergraduate enrollment had really not increased in a long time, and we’re concentrating on that because we want our undergraduate enrollment to feed our graduate and professional programs.”
Niche.com offers in-depth profiles on every school and college in America. Along with its reviews on companies and neighborhood, the site features more than 200,000 total profiles.
Visitors also can find more than 100 million ratings and reviews from users; more than 50 million people used Niche.com in the last year.
The site is broken down into categories of K-12 schools, colleges, graduate schools and places to live. Each category features several subcategories, including school searches, quizzes, scholarship information, comparison tools, rankings and home buying tips.
WCU also received three national rankings in Niche’s annual review – No. 3 (of 333) in “Best Christian Colleges,” No. 9 (of 972) in “Best Colleges for Education,” and No. 30 (of 968) in “Best Small Colleges.”
“It’s just encouraging that we feel like we’re going in the right direction,” Burnett said. “We can’t control certain parts of the aspects of the outside variables of these rankings, but what we can control is the service that we provide on our campus.
“We’re going to keep working on being the best possible place for our students. If we continue to make those improvements, I don’t feel like anybody can outrank us.”
