Engaged Education

Baylor earns high ranking for student engagement by The Wall Street Journal/Times Higher Education college rankings 

Baylor ranked fifth nationally out of 797 institutions in The Wall Street Journal/Times Higher Education 2021 College Rankings in the category of engagement, which measures how well a university informs, inspires and challenges students.

The College Rankings is a study of U.S. colleges and universities that puts student success and learning at its heart. The ranking adopts a balanced scorecard approach with four pillars — engagement, outcomes, resources and environment — that combine 15 individual performance indicators to create an overall score reflecting an institution’s strength.

The ranking is designed to answer the questions that matter most to students and their families when determining who to trust with their education — one of the most important decisions of their lives.

Measures of engagement include:

• the extent to which the college or university supports critical thinking, such as developing new concepts or evaluating different points of view;
• the extent to which the teaching supports reflection on, or making connections among, the things that the student has learned, such as combining ideas from different lessons to complete a task;
• the extent to which the teaching supports application of student’s learning to the real world, such as taking study excursions to see concepts in action;
• the extent to which the college challenges the student, such as presenting new ways of thinking to challenge assumptions or values.

Baylor was ranked No. 76 in the 2021 U.S. News & World Report Best Colleges. The University ranked 19th nationally for first-year experiences and 25th nationally among most innovative schools. The rankings evaluate more than 1,400 colleges and universities on 17 indicators of academic quality.