COLLEGE GUIDES 2019
Princeton Review Praises TAC Academics,
U.S. News Acknowledges Alumni Satisfaction

• Thomas Aquinas College provides one of the best undergraduate educations in the country, according to The Princeton Review. The education services company features the College in the 2019 edition of its annual guide, The Best 384 Colleges. Only about 15 percent of America’s 2,500 four-year colleges are profiled in the publication. Thomas Aquinas College is one of only three Catholic schools recommended by the Cardinal Newman Society to make The Princeton Review’s “Best Colleges” list, with scores of 96 for academics, 94 for quality of life, and 99 for financial aid. It is also the only Catholic school to be included among the 10 colleges and universities on the Princeton Review’s “Financial Aid Honor Roll.” 

• Meanwhile, U.S. News & World Report has named Thomas Aquinas College to it its annual list of the 10 Universities Where the Most Alumni Donate. The College, which has jockeyed for the #1 position with Princeton University for years, fell short of that distinction this time, but still claimed the second-highest percentage of alumni donating — and the highest among all national liberal arts colleges. As part of its annual ranking of American colleges and universities, U.S. News & World Report measures the percentage of alumni who contribute to their alma maters, so as to gauge graduates’ satisfaction with the education they have received. The College is the only Catholic institution to make the Top 10 rankings, the only one from the Western United States, and the only one founded within the last 100 years.

TAC rankings in other college guides 

STUDENT REFLECTIONS
Rising Sophomore Blogs about Dress Code, Curriculum

A rising sophomore who writes anonymously on her blog, Earl Grey Soliloquy, has recently published two posts of interest about the life of the College. In the first, she describes how she has come to love the College’s dress code:

“[H]aving everybody dressed so well does a lot to improve the atmosphere, dominated as it is by college students with no pretensions to put-together-ness. It makes us hold ourselves and each other to higher standards.”

“His simple method of observing and opening every single pea pod to record its characteristics yielded some remarkable results: probability ratios of offspring genetics, ratios of hybrids to constants, and proportions of how offspring would actually look compared to its genetic makeup (because of the tendency of the dominant trait to always manifest when present). … Mendel’s discoveries are still relevant today, as the quiet little botanist monk is now known as the father of genetics.”

Read Earl Grey Soliloquy 

FAITH IN ACTION
Highlights from the College’s Alumni Blog

The College’s Faith in Action blog features regular updates about the good works of alumni in the Church and in the world. In recent weeks, there have been plenty of both!

In the Church, Sr. Maria Battista of the Lamb of God (Maria Forshaw ’07) became the latest fully professed alumna, having made her final vows at the Carmel of St. Joseph in St. Louis, Missouri, on June 9. “We are celebrating this morning a holy Mass that is a special occasion of joy and thanksgiving,” said Rev. Brian W. Harrison, O.S., who presided at the profession, “not just for Sr. Maria Battista … not just for her other sisters as well, here at St. Joseph’s Carmelite Monastery, not just for the Archdiocese of St. Louis, but also, I would venture to say, for the Universal Church.”

Then, on June 29, the Most Rev. William McGrattan, Bishop of Calgary, ordained Rev. Derek Remus (’11), making him the College’s newest — and 72nd! — alumnus priest. “I want to reach out to young people by showing them that the Faith is reasonable and it is only in God and in Christ they can be truly happy,” says Fr. Remus in a recent profile in the Calgary Herald. “It is important these days to show the Faith is not opposed to reason and not opposed to science. I have a missionary mentality to go out and preach the truth to everybody.”

Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., President Donald Trump has nominated Mary Bridget Neumayr (’86) to become the chairwoman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. For the last year, Miss Neumayr has served as the Council’s chief of staff, prior to which she spent eight years working for the House Energy and Commerce Committee. “Mary Neumayr will make a strong leader at the Council on Environmental Quality,” says Sen. John Barrasso, chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. “Her significant experience at the White House and on Capitol Hill will serve her well in this key environmental policy position.”

And elsewhere in the nation’s capital, James Layne (’08) has accepted a position as counsel for Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Arizona) on the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. “I and my colleagues on the committee staff are essentially the lawyers who represent and counsel our senators, especially on issues that fall under the committee’s jurisdiction,” he explains. “We study legislation that has been referred to the committee as well as analyze how this legislation would fit into the existing legal and policy framework, then recommend to the senator what action we advise him to take.”

Faith in Action blog