The University of Miami is one of the country’s best institutions for undergraduate education, according to The Princeton Review. The education services company features the school in the new, 2010 edition of its popular guidebook, The Best 371 Colleges. Only about 15 percent of America’s 2,500 four-year colleges and two Canadian colleges are profiled in the book, The Princeton Review’s flagship annual college guide. It includes detailed profiles of the colleges with school rating scores in eight categories, plus ranking lists of top 20 schools in 62 categories based on The Princeton Review’s surveys of students attending the colleges.

“We commend the University of Miami for its outstanding academics,  the primary criteria for our choice of schools for the book,” says Robert Franek, Princeton Review’s vice president of publishing and author of The Best 371 Colleges. “We also work to keep a wide representation of colleges in the book by region, size, selectivity, and character. We make our choices based on institutional data we gather about schools, feedback from students attending them, and input from our staff who visit hundreds of colleges a year. We also value the opinions and suggestions of our 23-member National College Counselor Advisory Board and the independent college counselors we hear from yearlong.”

In its profile on the University of Miami, The Princeton Review praises the school for being No. 1 in “Race/Class Interaction” and quotes extensively from UM students who were surveyed for the book. The University of Miami offers “academic excellence along with cultural diversity,” said one; another stated, “Students here are respected, and seemingly no one rests until every pupil is academically satiated.”

“The University of Miami’s diverse student body is a reflection of the world we live in,” says Patricia A. Whitely, UM vice president for student affairs. “Our students are learning to embrace and appreciate ethnic and cultural differences that unify them. The unique experience they gain at UM within and outside of the classroom will prepare them for success in today’s global social and economic environment.”

The Princeton Review’s 62 ranking lists in The Best 371 Colleges are based entirely on its survey of 122,000 students (about 325 per campus on average) attending the colleges in the book. The 80-question survey asks students to report on their campus experiences and rate their schools on several topics, including professors, administrators, financial aid, and campus food. Student reports about student body political leanings, race/class relations, gay community acceptance, and other aspects of campus life also are reflected in rankings lists.

The Princeton Review does not rank the colleges in the book academically or from 1 to 371 in any category, nor do the rankings reflect The Princeton Review’s opinion of the schools. A college’s appearance on a ranking list is entirely the result of a high consensus among its surveyed students about a topic compared with that of students at other schools answering the same survey question(s) on the ranking list topic.

In a “Survey Says. . .” sidebar in the book’s profile on the University of Miami, The Princeton Review lists topics that UM students were in most agreement about in their answers to survey questions. The list includes: “Diverse student types on campus,” “low cost of living,” and “great athletic facilities.”

The school profiles in The Best 371 Colleges also include ratings based largely on institutional data collected by The Princeton Review during the 2008-09 academic year. The ratings are scores on a scale of 60 to 99, tallied in eight categories. Among them are ratings for Admissions Selectivity, Financial Aid, Fire Safety, and Green, a rating introduced in 2008 to measure a school’s commitment to environmentally related policies, practices, and education. Among the ratings in the profile on the University of Miami are scores of 93 for “Quality of Life,” 90 for “Green,” and 96 for “Admissions.” [Note: A rating score of 60* (sixty with an asterisk) is given when The Princeton Review did not receive a sufficient amount of data from the college to tally a rating on that topic.]

The Princeton Review posts the school profiles and ranking lists in The Best 371 Colleges on its Web site at www.PrincetonReview.com, at which users can read FAQs about the book, the survey, and the criteria for each of the ratings and rankings.

The Best 371 Colleges is the 18th edition of The Princeton Review’s annual “best colleges” book. Over the years, the book and its ranking lists have been favorably cited by former President Bill Clinton, former Vice President Dick Cheney, and former Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, among others. It is one of 165 Princeton Review books published by Random House in a line that also includes The Complete Book of Colleges and The Best Northeastern Colleges, the 2010 editions of which will be published on August 4.

The schools in The Best 371 Colleges are also part of 640 colleges and universities that The Princeton Review commends in its Web site feature “2010 Best Colleges: Region by Region – Northeast/Midwest/Southeast/West.”

The Princeton Review is known for its tutoring and classroom test preparation courses, books, and college and graduate school admission services. Its corporate headquarters is in Framingham, Massachusetts, and editorial offices are in New York City. It is not affiliated with Princeton University and is not a magazine.