1 NJ College Lands on Beautiful Campus List

While a good education is key when deciding which college or university to go to, campuses can also be a factor. With this in mind, Yardbarker ranked the top 20 universities with beautiful campuses.

Let’s pretend that price is not a factor because the price of many of these colleges is way out of the price range for most of us. However, if we were deciding on a higher education for ourselves or our undergraduate child, all of these are charming places to attend.

There’s just one university on the list that is located in New Jersey. Princeton University was slotted at the 6th on the list by Yardbarker for beautiful campuses. I can back that up because I went to Princeton University, many times actually. Don’t be ridiculous, I wasn’t a student!

I worked in Princeton for over a decade right on Witherspoon Street. Witherspoon intersects Nassau Street right at the beautiful and glorious main entrance to the university.

I loved being able to walk just a couple of blocks and enjoy a leisurely stroll about the campus, stop at Hoagie Haven for lunch, and spend some time browsing at the Princeton Record Exchange. There was also the occasional visit to Jadwyn Gym to watch the Tiger play basketball.

As I would walk around the Ivy League school’s campus, I’d think about the famous and great people who had also walked the same path. People like Albert Einstein, Michelle Obama, Brooke Shields, Sonia Sotomayor, Bill Bradley, and so many more important and smart humans.

Another college on the list that I visited was number 3, the University of Notre Dame. We were in Chicago for one of my daughter’s basketball tournaments and my son, at the time, was interested in attending Notre Dame. We took the one-hundred-mile drive to see it. “Its gorgeous architecture that looks plucked straight from the Old World, and it takes on new beauty in each season, looking particularly stunning in the fall.” We saw “Touchdown Jesus,” Notre Dame Stadium, and The Basilica of the Sacred Heart

Other beautiful campuses include Harvard University at number 2 on the list, Washington University at St. Louis at 7, the University of Pennsylvania where my wife attended is 17, and number 12, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Click here to see the full list including which college landed in the number 1 spot.

According to U.S. News & World Report, ten universities and colleges in New Jersey are among the best in the country with one ranked number one for the past 12 years.

Our family is going through the college decision making process for the second time, this time with two at once. My oldest made it easy because he knew exactly which university he wanted to attend. There was no comparing schools or long distance college visits. My twins are a bit different. Neither one of them has decided where they want to go, we've been on multiple long distance college visits, and they've just begun their senior year of high school.

Going through the U.S. News & World Report list of top universities and colleges in the country was very helpful. They examined fifteen hundred colleges and universities that offer bachelor's degrees and conducted "17 measures of academic quality."

U.S. News & World Report does a great job of breaking down each school by "rankings data and key characteristics about majors, campus life, costs of attending, and more." The result of their study comes from years of research using both past and current data.

Some of the ranking factors were graduation and retention rates, social mobility, graduation rate performance, undergraduate academic reputation, and faculty resources. The faculty resources from last year were examined in the following categories... class size index, faculty compensation, percent full time and part time faculty with terminal degree in their field, percent faculty that is full time, and student faculty ratio.

The New Jersey colleges and universities that landed in the top one hundred on the list are Princeton, Rutgers-New Brunswick, Rutgers-Newark, Rutgers-Camden, Stevens Institute of Technology, New Jersey Institute of Technology,  Seton Hall University, Stockton University, Montclair State University, and Rowan University. One of them topped the list for the 12th year in a row. Here's the run down of all the New Jersey schools that made the list and where they ranked in no particular order.