IUP has been recognized, for the second year in a row, as one of “America's Top Colleges” by Forbes magazine.
IUP is one of only twenty-three Pennsylvania colleges and universities chosen for this fourth annual listing. There are 6,600 accredited postsecondary institutions in the U.S.
“America's Top Colleges” includes 650 institutions. Magazine editors chose colleges and universities for the listing “based on the things that matter most to students: quality of teaching, great career prospects, graduation rates, and low levels of debt.”
The rankings are based on five categories:
- student satisfaction (judged by surveys on the Rate My Professor website and freshman-to-sophomore retention rates)
- postgraduate success (assessed through alumni surveys and alumni inclusion in “Who's Who in America” and the Forbes corporate officer list)
- student debt load after graduation
- four-year graduation rate
- national competitive awards received by students
In the last decade, IUP students have won ten Fulbright scholarships, five Goldwater awards, and seventeen international study-abroad awards from the Freeman-Asia and Gilman foundations.
The Forbes listing follows IUP's selection, for the seventeenth year in a row, as one of the nation's top doctoral universities by U.S. News & World Report. IUP is included in the magazine's 2011 edition of “Best Colleges” and is one of its top 262 national doctoral universities.
In July, IUP celebrated its eleventh consecutive year of inclusion in the Princeton Review's Best Colleges guidebook.
Also receiving ongoing recognition from the Princeton Review is the Eberly College of Business and Information Technology. It was one of fifteen graduate schools of business in the nation named to the Princeton Review's 2010 “Student Opinion Honors for Business Schools.” It also gained national prominence in the Princeton Review's inaugural edition of The Best Business Schools in 2005 and has continued to be selected annually by guidebook editors.