The number of kids heading to college has
never been higher. Competition is intense.
Here are 12 schools—big, small, public, private,
urban, rural—that are drawing raves.

This Year's

Hot Colleges

by Barbara Kantrowitz and Suzanne Smalley

It happens each Fall. Suddenly, it seems as though the same few schools are at the top of everyone's list, and no one's quite sure why. The spark could be as frivolous as a celebrity student, like Chelsea Clinton at Stanford. Winning a national sports title helps, too: Northwestern and Duke are deluged with applicants when their teams score big. And then there's location, location, location. Applications to NYU and Columbia soared in the early 1990s as New York City became safer. In 2002-03, with the number of college-bound seniors at a high, schools all over the country will see their applicant numbers rise. Although the usual suspects-the Ivy League, the so-called Little Ivies like Amherst and Williams, and places like MIT and Stanford-will still get many more qualified students than they can admit, the landscape is changing. With a tough economy, the hottest schools may well be the best bargains-those offering excellent academics at more affordable prices. That's why our list for 2002-03 is dominated by some of the country's top public universities, like the University of North Caroline at Chapel Hill. Another trend we've spotted is renewed interest in science and technology-spurred by highly publicized advances in recent years like the Human Genome Project. A number of schools, including liberal-arts colleges like Kenyon in Ohio, made our list because they've embarked on new initiatives to improve science education and research.

Before you read on, a caveat: our list is not definitive, and doesn't include schools we've selected in the last two issues. But it should give you a sense of how many wonderful opportunities are out there, often where you least expect them. With that, we present, in alphabetical order, America's 12 Hottest Schools:

• Arizona State University
• Boston College
• University of California, Santa Barbara
• Davidson College
• George Washington University
• Kenyon College
• Macalester College
• University of Maryland, Baltimore County
• McGill University
• The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• Pepperdine University
• University of Washington at Seattle

THE PUBLICATION'S PROFILE OF UCSB

With its glamorous location on 989 acres of Pacific Ocean coastline overlooking the Santa Ynez Mountains, UCSB used to be known as a major party school. Now it's the party school with an increasingly impressive academic reputation. Three faculty members have won Nobel Prizes in recent years. UCSB's engineering school is highly rated in national rankings in many departments, especially in the rapidly expanding field of materials science. The school's Ph.D. physics program is one of the top 10 in the country, and the Institute for Theoretical Physics attracts scientists from around the world to debate such questions as the future of cosmology. One quarter of undergraduates take part in research, teaming up with faculty and grad students. Applicants apparently have taken notice. Freshman applications have increased by 67 percent in the last five academic years, compared with 31 percent for the UC campuses as a whole, and 27 percent of the students who applied for the class of 2006 had a GPA of 4.0 or higher.

Not surprisingly for a school just two hours north of Hollywood, UCSB is famous for its film-studies major that lets students study film theory along with aesthetics. In the past few years, graduates of the film-studies program have been nominated for Academy Awards in areas as disparate as animation and adapted screenplay.

UCSB is the only school in the UC system to offer religious studies through the Ph.D. level. The program stands out nationally because it focuses on the cultural aspects of faith, as opposed to other programs that primarily train priests or ministers. In 2002 the university opened a new building for its school of environmental science and management that is recognized as the greenest building in California because it meets the highest federal and local standards of energy efficiency. In addition, just about everything used in the construction project—including demolition waste, silt and other debris—was recycled.