CANTON -- St. Lawrence University has moved up two spots in the U.S. News & World Report ranking of national liberal arts colleges, just released.

St. Lawrence University is Number 53 among the 252 best, most prestigious liberal arts colleges in the nation, as ranked by U.S. News & World Report this year. That ranking places the university in the top 20 percent of its peer group.

President William L. Fox said, "Our excellent, hard-won reputation is immensely important, particularly to prospective students and families as they begin the search for the college or university that will be the right fit. "

The 2012 rankings, which include fewer than half of all colleges in the nation, are available at www.usnews.com/colleges, and will also be published in the September issue of the magazine.

The rankings have been compiled and published by the magazine for 28 years, grouping schools based on categories created by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Colleges are compared against their peer institutions on a variety of factors.

Among the factors weighed in determining the rankings, the key measures of quality are peer and guidance counselor assessment; graduation and retention rates; faculty resources; student selectivity; financial resources; alumni giving; and graduation-rate performance.

St. Lawrence scores particularly well in its average freshman-to-sophomore retention rate, at 90 percent, and in its predicted versus actual graduation rate, at 75 percent versus 83 percent.

St. Lawrence recently was rated as one of the nation's best institutions for undergraduate education by the editors of The Princeton Review. Sierra magazine, a publication of the Sierra Club, not only recognized the university in its annual listing of colleges and universities contributing in the effort to stop climate change and educate students about sustainability, but also featured St. Lawrence's Adirondack Semester in its "Cool Schools" 2011 issue.