25 Hottest Schools

Hottest for Saving America's Schools
University of Texas-Austin, Austin, Texas

Texas's flagship state university is rising to new prominence in education reform. UT-Austin researchers like economist Chrys Dougherty have done landmark work on the effects of Advanced Placement high-school courses on college success. UT mathematician Uri Treisman has led the way in raising the level of instruction for minority children. A rapidly expanding program called UTeach recruits science and math majors into teaching with classroom experience as early as freshman year. "The kind of mentoring I received from master teachers was really important," says Katie Weber, a 2004 UTeach alum who teaches seventh-grade science. The Teach for America program on campus is soaring, with the number of new graduates heading for inner-city and rural classroom assignments increasing from 24 to 62 in just a year.

Hottest Big State School
University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wis.

Growing up in Wisconsin, Laura Sullivan was raised on Badger mania. But she was initially afraid that she would get lost in Madison amid 41,000 students, 140 undergraduate majors and nearly 700 student organizations. So when her high-school German class visited, Sullivan says she was shocked to find that she immediately felt at home. The tree-filled campus of nearly 1,000 acres looked to her exactly like a college should. It occurred to her that its enormity actually meant "endless opportunities," she says. It is the old traditions graduates remember most, including Picnic Point, declared by one newspaper to be "the kissing-est spot in North America."

Hottest for International Studies
University of Richmond, Richmond, VA.

Seventy percent of the class of 2007 studied abroad, attending universities in Oxford, Edinburgh, Prague, Milan, Buenos Aires, Hong Kong, Bangkok and other cosmopolitan spots. The 3,000-student university has exchange agreements with more than 50 schools around the world and ensures that time spent abroad costs no more than time on campus. The faculty is strong in many areas, particularly business, science and leadership studies, but all students are urged to see the world.

Hottest for Business
Babson College, Babson Park, Mass.

Just as violinists know why they're at Juilliard, and physicists at Caltech, the 1,700 students attending Babson understand what made them choose this small campus. They are entrepreneurs, and no school does a better job than Babson in teaching how to start businesses. Jason Reuben grew up in Los Angeles and by fourth grade was selling ketchup packets at his elementary school's Friday barbecues. He started a Web design firm in high school. He knew Babson was for him when, during a campus visit, he saw all the people in one lecture hall pull out their laptops to look up business data.

© 2007