Awards and Honors
The Association of Public and Land-grant Universities has selected Kent State University as one of four finalists for the association’s 2020 Degree Completion Award. The annual award works to identify, recognize and reward institutions that employ innovative approaches to improve degree completion while ensuring educational quality.
Kent State University is proud to announce its 2020 Alumni Award recipients. Recipients are chosen based on their exceptional contributions in their chosen profession, in their communities and at Kent State. Sponsored by the alumni association, the Alumni Awards are the university’s most prestigious honors given to alumni.
Kent State University shines again in the new 2021 U.S. News & World Report Best Colleges rankings. Kent State is the highest-ranking public university in Northern Ohio on the Top Public Schools and Best National Universities lists in the newly released rankings.
Forbes and market research company Statista have named Kent State University No. 1 among employers in Northern Ohio and No. 4 in the entire state of Ohio on the 2020 America’s Best-in-State Employers list that highlights America’s best employers. Kent State is also the top educational institution on the Ohio list. (Photo from 2019 Employee Appreciation Day event)
Kent State University is being recognized for the ninth time as a “Great College to Work For” by The Chronicle of Higher Education, a top trade publication for colleges and universities, and ModernThink LLC, a consulting firm. Now in its 13th year, the “Great Colleges to Work For” annual report recognizes the colleges that get top ratings from their employees on workforce practices and policies.
In 2019, a team of researchers in Kent State’s Department of Anthropology published its “prize-winning” research article titled “Experimental replication shows knives manufactured from frozen human feces do not work” in the Journal of Archaeological Science. (Yes, the jokes are seemingly endless, but seriously folks, there is an important underlying message here about evidence-based research and fact-checking!)
Kent State University’s commitment to maintaining a diverse and inclusive campus has received acknowledgement from INSIGHT Into Diversity magazine, the oldest and largest diversity-focused publication in higher education, for an eighth consecutive year. INSIGHT Into Diversity magazine has selected Kent State as a recipient of the 2020 Higher Education Excellence in Diversity (HEED) Award.
Kent State University brought home the gold after this year’s Akron ADDY Awards, with both professionals and students being recognized for their work. The ADDYs, put on by the Akron Chapter of the American Advertising Federation, celebrate the area’s best creative work in advertising.
Kent State University has won the Mid-American Conference’s Faculty Athletics Representative (FAR) for women’s sports award for the first time in school history.
For the second year in a row, Kent State University has the distinction of ranking among the top 20 companies nationwide in Forbes’ recently released list of America’s Best Employers for Diversity 2020.