The Top 20 Wired Colleges, Each in Their Own Way

Last month, I reported on the most Web 2.0 college campuses, a list created by IntelliGrad that looked at things like online lectures, iTunes campuses, and other forms of high-tech student engagement. Top honors went to Berkeley and Stanford, which didn't come as a big surprise since they are at the geographical epicenter of high tech.

This month, a very different look at technology on college campuses from PC Magazine and The Princeton Review offers a few more surprise twists. Quinnipiac University and University of Oklahoma are both in the top 10. Villanova, M.I.T., and Indiana University-Bloomington took the top three positions.

What makes a winning wired school? In Villanova's case it was its finance lab, which gives students access to all the tools of Wall Street—stock tickers, LCDs, and Bloomberg work stations—as well as the fact that all entering freshmen receive Dell laptops and that 60 percent of the campus is wireless. At Creighton University in Nebraska (fifth on the list), it was GameFest (an all-night affair of console and PC game tournaments over the school's network), no limits on music and app downloads on the network, and P2P connections that secured its place. At the University of Southern California (number 8), it was the high-resolution videoconferencing in libraries, open-access wireless network services, and webcams in all classrooms that defined its place.

The survey of campus administrators looked at academics, student resources, and campus infrastructure. It also 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. The full list appears in this month's issue of PC Magazine (Issue 1) and will appear on the magazine's web site on December 19 in its entirety.

Reading the Top 20 profiles, it's clear that, while college campuses are all becoming more "wired," they're each doing it in a unique way. It's exciting to see that technology is more than a uniform at these schools; it's helping them differentiate themselves from the pack.

Disclosure: Robin Raskin once worked for both PC Magazine and The Princeton Review.