Westmont Moves up in National Ranking

Westmont is listed among the nation’s top 100 liberal arts colleges in the most recent U.S. News & World Report rankings, which were released today.

The college, which has been on the magazine’s list of top national liberal arts colleges since the late 1980s, moved from the third tier (ranked roughly between 110th and 160th out of 217 colleges) to the second tier (ranked 97th ).

Westmont moved from the fourth tier to the third in 2000. The news comes just a week before Westmont
welcomes the class of 2007 to campus. Orientation for first-year students and their parents is Aug. 28 and 29, and classes begin Sept. 1 (Westmont takes a four-day holiday in mid-October in lieu of Labor Day).

U.S. News & World Report uses a number of factors to achieve its rankings, among them national reputation, (determined by peer assessments); retention (the percentage of students who graduate and the percentage of freshmen who return after their first year); student selectivity (ACT and SAT scores as well as other factors); faculty and financial resources; and alumni giving rates.

Westmont’s students are exceptional scholars. The average SAT score of a first-year student over the past three years has been 1230. Entering students’ grade-point average during that time has been 3.84.

There are only eight other California institutions in the top two tiers of the national liberal arts listings, among them Pomona, Claremont-McKenna, Harvey Mudd, Scripps, Occidental, Mills, Thomas Aquinas, and Pitzer.

Santa Barbara has three exceptional institutions of higher learning with Westmont (a national liberal arts college), UCSB (ranked 45th among the top doctoral-granting universities in the nation) and Santa Barbara City College, which is widely regarded as one of the finest community colleges in the country.

For more information, contact the public affairs office at (805) 565-6051 or mmeier@westmont.edu.