Saint Mary’s Named Among Top 20 Most Transformative Colleges

Saint Mary’s College has ranked among Money’s top 20 Most Transformative Colleges in the nation. Money’s Specialty Rankings, a section in its Best Colleges in America 2018–19 edition, focuses not only on an elite college’s ability to produce high graduation rates or alumni success, but on its ability to help students “do far better than would be expected from their academic and economic backgrounds.” Money refers to this ability as a college’s value-add rate. Saint Mary’s value-add rate earned it a number 17 on Money’s list of Most Transformative Colleges.

“This acknowledgment not only highlights the College’s academic distinctiveness, it underscores how our students go on to lead rewarding personal and professional lives as a result of our commitment to the liberal arts tradition and Lasallian Catholic mission of Saint Mary’s,” said President James Donahue. “We are honored that Saint Mary’s has been recognized as one of the most transformative institutions of higher education in the country.”

Money’s ranking is not the first time the College has been recognized for providing life-transforming educational experiences. In 2017, the Chronicle of Higher Education highlighted Saint Mary’s as among 40 universities and colleges in the nation with distinctive upward mobility rates—propelling students, whose families came from the bottom 20 percent income bracket, into the top 20 percent income bracket. And in 2013, Saint Mary’s was named one of 40 institutions listed in the prestigious higher education guidebook Colleges That Change Lives: 40 Schools That Will Change the Way You Think About Colleges.

For its Specialty Ranking category, Money, a division of Time magazine, ranked colleges based on value-add scores for graduation rates, earnings, and student loan repayment, eliminating schools with any negative scores or a graduation rate below 50 percent. Its sources for determining value-added scores included the U.S. Department of Education, Peterson’s, PayScale.com, and its own Money/College Measures calculations.

In addition to earning high marks in Money’s specialty rankings, Saint Mary’s is listed near the top third of the 727 colleges and universities colleges featured in Money’s 2018-19 Best Colleges Rankings guide.