LEWISTON, Idaho – Lewis-Clark State College continues to be one of the higher ranked public institutions in the West, according to U.S. News & World Report in its annual Best Colleges rankings released on Tuesday.
LCSC moved up to No. 5 among the Top Public Schools in the West, a category that includes everything west of Oklahoma and the Dakotas. LCSC was tied for sixth a year ago and has been consistently ranked in the Top 10 for years.
For the second straight year, LCSC was listed No. 23 in colleges in the West overall rankings, which include both public and privates colleges. This ranking is for colleges that focus on undergraduate education but award fewer than half of their degrees in the liberal arts.
U.S. News & World Report rankings are based on data collected from each college in as many as 15 areas of academic excellence. These areas include graduation and retention rates (22.5 percent of the college’s overall score) undergraduate academic reputation (22.5 percent), faculty resources (20 percent), student selectivity (12.5 percent), financial resources (10 percent), graduate rate performance (7.5 percent) and alumni giving rate (5 percent).
LCSC has the lowest tuition among Idaho’s four-year public institutions and has an enrollment of close to 4,000 students. LCSC was one of more than 1,800 colleges and universities to submit data to be included in rankings, which started in 1983 to provide college-bound students information on schools and to make comparisons.
Lewis-Clark State College, which is known for its personal attention to students with a student-faculty ratio of 14:1 and nearly 75 percent of its classes having 20 or fewer students, was founded in 1893 and will celebrate its 125th birthday next year.