WSU ranks sixth nationally in student-opinion based Princeton Review

WSU ranked No. 6 nationally in The Princeton Review's 2027 'Their Students Love These Colleges' category, one of four top-10 placements in the latest edition of the Best Colleges guide. These rankings are entirely based on the students' opinions surveyed by The Princeton Review. Before a college can appear in one of the 50 ranking lists, it must first be included in The Princeton Review's Best Colleges guide. For the 2027 edition, The Princeton Review selected 392 colleges, primarily based on its assessment of their academic offerings. The company says it continuously monitors colleges and annually collects data on more than 2,000 schools. The Princeton Review's 2027 rankings include surveys of approximately 172,000 students. The company's 98-question-long survey asks students about four areas: academics and administration, life at their college, fellow students and themselves. The Princeton Review then assigns each college a numerical score based on students' answers to each survey question. These scores are used to produce 50 separate ranking lists, each naming the top 25 schools in a particular category. For the 2027 rankings, the 172,000 student responses represent an average of about 439 students per school. However, The Princeton Review notes that the number varies according to the size of a school's student body. The published methodology does not identify how many WSU students specifically contributed to its No. 6 ranking. WSU has nearly 25,000 students across its campuses, meaning the Princeton Review's average of 439 students per school is equivalent to about 1.7% of WSU's systemwide enrollment. The publicly available methodology does not provide enough information to determine what percentage of WSU students responded or whether those respondents reflect the university's overall student population. The survey also should not be confused with The Princeton Review's broader college ratings, which are a separate numerical rating system, primarily based on institutional data provided by college administrators.