Mercer University is mentioned in the pages of The Princeton Review’s annual best colleges guide for the 14th consecutive year. Only about 15 percent of America’s 2,500 four-year colleges are profiled in this year’s guide, “The Best 381 Colleges."
 
The guide, which has been printed annually since 1992, is based on surveys of 143,000 students about their school’s academics, administration, student body and themselves.
 
Mercer offers “big school opportunities with a small school environment,” reads the publication’s profile of the University. “The ‘active and welcoming atmosphere’ offers ‘easy access to study resources’ and an administration that ‘is there for the students.’”
 
“The professors here are ‘phenomenal,’ allowing students to think for themselves and arrive at their own conclusions… ‘The greatest strength of [Mercer] is the value it places on students,’ says one of a school that ‘[encourages] participation in every facet of the university.’”
 
The Princeton Review does not rank the colleges academically or from No. 1 to No. 381 in any category. Instead, it provides detailed profiles of the colleges with rating scores for all schools in several categories, plus 62 ranking lists of the top 20 colleges in various categories. This year, Mercer is ranked No. 5 in the category “Everyone Plays Intramural Sports” and No. 11 in “Most Active Student Government.”
 
“Mercer’s outstanding academics are the chief reason we chose it for this book, and we strongly recommend it to applicants,” said Robert Franek, Princeton Review’s senior vice president, publisher and author of “The Best 381 Colleges.” “We make our selections primarily based on data we collect through our annual surveys of administrators at several hundred four-year colleges. Additionally, we give considerable weight to observations from our school visits, opinions of our staff and our 24-member National College Counselor Advisory Board, and an unparalleled amount of feedback we get from our surveys of students attending these schools. We also keep a wide representation of colleges in the book by region, size, selectivity and character.”