Organizations such as U.S. News & World Report, Forbes and Princeton Review regularly rate teaching colleges across the country. Rankings are based on criteria such as student and faculty surveys, salary reports, acceptance and graduation rates, graduate record examination scores, and grade-point averages.
Highly ranked teaching colleges in the northeast states include the Program in Teaching at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Forbes.com ranked Williams College the best school in the country for 2010. U.S. News & World Report named Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, the best teaching school in the country for 2010. Other notable schools include Miami University in Oxford, Ohio; Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut; the Teachers College at Columbia University in New York, New York; the University of Vermont in Burlington, Vermont; and the University of Maryland Baltimore County in Baltimore, Maryland.
In the western states, Stanford University in Stanford, California, was ranked sixth in the country by Forbes. The University of California Berkeley's teaching program, located in Berkeley, California, was ranked sixth in the country for 2010 by U.S. News & World Report. Other notable western teaching colleges include the University of Washington, in Seattle, Washington; Whitman College, in Walla Walla, Washington; Loyola Marymount University, in Los Angeles, California; and Evergreen State College, in Olympia, Washington.
U.S. News & World Report ranked The University of Notre Dame's Teachers as Scholars program, located in Notre Dame, Indiana, as the fourth teaching school in 2010. Other notable Midwestern schools include the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, Michigan; Purdue University, in West Lafayette, Indiana; Northwestern University, in Evanston, Illinois; and the University of Chicago, in Chicago, Illinois.
The University of Virginia's Curry School of Education, in Charlottesville, Virginia, was ranked eighth in the country for 2010. Clemson University, in Clemson, South Carolina, and Wake Forest University, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, tied for the title of U.S. News & World Report's twelfth best teaching college in the country in 2010. Other notable schools in southern states include Trinity University, in San Antonio, Texas; Centre College, in Danville, Kentucky; the University of Texas at Austin; and Rice University, in Houston, Texas.