Averett University Climbs in Rank in U.S. News & World Report’s Best Colleges List

Posted on September 12th, 2017 by Travis Dix

Averett University has reached its highest ranking yet as the no. 17 best regional liberal arts college in the south this year by U.S. News & World Report. In addition, Averett climbed in other rankings, being named the seventh best regional college in the south for veterans in 2018, as well as the ninth-ranking Southern regional college for best value.

Only three Virginia schools made the “2018 Regional Liberal Arts Colleges” list, with Averett retaining its position as the highest ranking Virginia regional college out of a total of 57 for the south. It is also the only Virginia school to rank among the “2018 Best Value Schools” and the “2018 Best Colleges for Veterans.”

“This is a big year for us at Averett, and these accolades help to reinforce the momentum we continue to see around us,” said Averett President Dr. Tiffany M. Franks. “The growth we’ve experienced – both in undergraduate enrollment and retention – has been deliberate and strategic through additions of academic and co-curricular pipelines, so seeing the congruent growth in our rankings reaffirms the upward trajectory that we’ve been working toward.”

For the 2018 regional list of schools, U.S. News evaluated schools that are heavily focused on the undergraduate experience and offer a broad range of programs in the liberal arts (which account for fewer than half of bachelor’s degrees granted) and in fields such as business, nursing and education. Because most of the 324 colleges in the category draw heavily from nearby states, they are ranked by region: North, South, Midwest and West.

U.S. News has produced the Best Colleges for Veterans rankings to provide military veterans and active-duty service members with data on which top-ranked schools offer benefits that can help them make pursuing a college education more affordable. These rankings only include numerically ranked schools in the 2018 edition of the U.S. News Best Colleges rankings that are in the top half of their U.S. News ranking category that have enrolled 20 or more veterans or active service members, and those that had 20 or more students who used GI Bill® benefits to partially or fully finance their tuition and fees during the 2016–2017 academic year.

For the “Best Value Schools” list, the calculation takes into account a school’s academic quality based on its U.S. News Best Colleges ranking and the 2016-17 net cost of attendance for a student who received the average level of need-based financial aid. The higher the quality of the program and the lower the cost, the better the deal. Only schools in the top half of their U.S. News ranking categories are included because U.S. News considers the most significant values to be among colleges that perform well academically.

The college ranking categories are based upon the 2015 Update of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching classifications. The Carnegie classification system has been used by U.S. News since the first Best Colleges rankings in 1983, because it is accepted as the basis for classifying schools by most higher education researchers.

The rankings are freely available at www.usnews.com/collegemeth.