We’ve always known it and now everyone else does, too. Sweet Briar College was ranked the No. 1 “Most Beautiful Campus” in the Princeton Review’s annual college guidebook, “Best 366 Colleges.”

“That’s one, I must admit, I’ve been surprised we never got before,” said SBC Dean Jonathan Green when he learned of the news.
Sweet Briar's buildings, which are on the National Register of Historic Places, and expansive,well-kept grounds, make it one of the prettiest college campuses in the country. Still, it was the other top-20 spots Sweet Briar owns in the Review’s 2008 edition that he found most gratifying. In addition to “Most Beautiful Campus,” SBC came in at No. 5 for “Best Career/Job Placement Services,” No. 8 for “Professors Make Themselves Available,” No. 10 for “Professors Get High Marks” and No. 13 for “Class Discussions Encouraged.”

Using surveys distributed to students at the institutions listed in the annual guidebook, the Review compiles top-20 lists in more than 60 categories. According to a press release from the publisher, “A college’s appearance on these lists is attributable to a high consensus among its surveyed students about the subject.”

“What’s gratifying from a dean’s perspective is that it’s pretty clear that students feel like they’re getting what they came here for, which is a good education,” Green said.

Although the student surveys are not scientific, he said they are often “uncannily” accurate reflections of the schools that are ranked. For example, colleges that do well in such categories as “Class Discussion Encouraged,” are usually the ones that score high in the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) — which is regarded as a valid assessment of how well institutions educate students in specific, empirically proven benchmarks.

The “Best Career/Job Placement Services” is a new category for 2008. The Review added it in response to reader requests. Wayne Stark, who directs SBC’s career services, said the high ranking is consistent with how his department typically scores in NSSE and similar surveys.

Stark recognizes that prospective students and parents do use rankings as one tool in their college search. “It’s exciting to see what [our students] are saying about us,” he said. “It’s a testament to the hard work of the career services staff, but also the campus as whole.”

If readers get anything from the No. 5 ranking, he’d like it to be that career services is an office you can count on, whether you’re a professor helping a student find an internship or a staff member who wants to hire a student assistant.

“And students,” he said. “They can count on us to do everything we can to help them reach their goals and dreams.”

The “Most Beautiful Campus” isn’t a new designation, and SBC is annually in the top five. Grounds supervisor Donna Meeks said the grounds crew didn’t do anything different this year, but that landscaping projects of recent years are maturing. “All these things that we’ve been doing are starting to show.”

Among other things, her nine-person crew is responsible for gardening, maintaining athletic fields, roads and walks, not to mention keeping acres of fields and fence lines tidy. “They’re things that if you don’t do, you’d notice,” she said.

They also care for the historic specimen trees and shrubs that distinguish Sweet Briar’s campus. “Let’s face it we’ve got a nice canvas to begin with. The people before us just knew [what] to plant,” Meeks said, citing a weeping beech and a flowering crab apple that are among her favorites.

Many of the trees are nearing their natural life spans. A few have already died from old age, despite meticulous care to keep them going.

“It kinds of hurts me when I think of another one going down,” Meeks said. “One of our initiatives is to start replanting and keep it going. It’s kind of a legacy here.”

The Princeton Review survey asks students 80 questions about their school’s academics, administration, campus life, student body and themselves. Tallies for this edition’s rankings are based on surveys of 120,000 students attending the 366 schools that are listed in the book, which represent about 15 percent of four-year U.S. colleges and two Canadian colleges.

The schools in the book are not ranked academically nor are they ranked 1 to 366 in any single category. The new rankings and profiles of the 366 schools are posted at the Princeton Review Web site.

– By Jennifer McManamay, SBC staff writer