The 2023 edition of the Princeton Review’s annual guidebook, The Best 388 Colleges, ranks Knox College among top U.S. colleges. Institutions are chosen primarily for academic quality, but are not ranked numerically. 

Colleges are included on ranked lists like “Best Midwestern Colleges” based on surveys of student opinions. The Princeton Review polled over 160,000 students across the country to find out everything they love at their school—from financial aid and residential life, to academic rigor and extracurriculars.

“Our selection of the colleges in this book is based on our opinion of their academic offerings. We recommend each one as an academically outstanding choice for an applicant,” said Rob Franek, editor-in-chief of the Princeton Review. “Our ranking lists, however, are not based on our opinions of the colleges, but on what the schools’ own students have told us about their experiences at them.”

Here are some excerpts from the Princeton Review's survey of Knox students:

• Knox College is an “independent-minded, uncannily smart” college that fosters a “lifelong love of learning and a sense of competence, confidence, and proportion” and enables students to “live with purpose.”
• Knox is one of the “25 most diverse liberal arts colleges” with a community of 1,200 students from 45 states and 49 countries.
• At Knox, students and faculty work closely together and teaching is distinguished by “inviting and expecting students to pursue fundamental questions in order to reach their own reflective but independent judgments.”