Quinnipiac University has been ranked as number nine in PC Magazine’s 2007 "Top 20 Wired Colleges."

PC Magazine and The Princeton Review announced the winners Tuesday, Dec. 12.

The list is available in the Dec. 26 issue of PC Magazine, where extensive profiles of the top 20 schools are available, as well as information on all 240 schools that completed the survey. On the Web site, users can also build charts to compare up to 10 schools.

“Cutting-edge technology has become an integral part of the college experience—and something that enables students to have many more marketable skills when they enter the workforce,” said PC Magazine Editor-in-Chief Jim Louderback.

Quinnipiac's listing at number nine is higher than St. John's University in New York City and Temple University in Philadelphia.

“Quinnipiac University’s top priority is the quality of its students’ educational experiences,” said  Richard Ferguson, Quinnipiac’s vice president and chief information officer. “Consequently, our technology investments and efforts are focused on improving that experience.”

John Paton, dean of academic technology at Quinnipiac, said Quinnipiac has a strong ongoing commitment to the use of technology in teaching and learning to enhance education where technology is most effective, train students to use the technologies they will need in their future careers and provide universal access to tools used daily for personal productivity such as e-mail and word processing.

To help achieve these goals Quinnipiac provides:

• A ubiquitous campus network including wireless in all public areas including residence halls, libraries, and classrooms.
• A laptop program that requires all students to have a university standard laptop and software and provides the same laptop to all teaching faculty.
• Classrooms that are all equipped with data projectors and network connections to the individual student.
• Public and classroom computer clusters that provide hardware and software that complement student laptops, including Mac clusters for design, workstation clusters for multimedia productions, a cluster of workstations configured to simulate a financial trading center and a complete high-definition production television studio.
• A course management system (based on Blackboard) that includes all courses and a linked online class registration system (WebAdvisor) that allows students to sign up for courses and access their transcripts online.
• A complete catalog of online courses offered to Quinnipiac students during the summer.
• Online library resources including bibliographic databases, journals and textbooks.

In addition, Quinnipiac uses technology to streamline a variety of traditional administrative tasks, including: the electronic submission of admissions applications, e-mail accounts for all committed students and payment for on and off campus services via an electronic debit card linked to the student I.D. card.

The “Top 20 Wired Colleges” honors colleges with the most comprehensive—in terms of size, scope and quality—computing and technology offerings.

To identify the honorees, The Princeton Review surveyed college administrators from the schools featured in the 2007 edition of the Princeton Review’s college guide, "Best 361 Colleges." The criteria focused on three main areas of technology -- academics, student resources and infrastructure -- and included questions on everything from faculty computer training to streaming media from the college's radio or television station to the types of tech support available to students on a 24-7 basis.

"Initially, you might be surprised by some of the schools on our 'Top 20 Wired Colleges,'" said Robert Franek, Princeton Review vice president. "At the Princeton Review, we know that finding the right fit school for college-bound students is not a matter of brand-name recognition but of quality of education and quality of life. All the schools on our list offer superior access, service, and infrastructure, and, by doing so, they go above and beyond to serve those very real student needs."