Today's college spotlight takes us to Fairfield, Connecticut, an affluent town on the Long Island Sound with easy access to New York City. Founded in 1942, Fairfield University is a relatively young school that has quickly grown in national prominence.

Fairfield is a Jesuit university, and part of its mission is to foster a student's sense of social responsibility and to integrate the intellectual and the spiritual. Undergraduates enroll in one of five colleges or schools; the College of Arts and Sciences and the well-regarded Dolan School of Business have the highest enrollments. Majors in Finance, Communication Studies and Nursing are the most popular among undergraduates.

While some of the preprofessional programs at Fairfield have the highest enrollments and strongest reputations, the university is grounded in the liberal arts and sciences. In fact, the school's strengths in the liberal arts and sciences earned it a chapter of the prestigious Phi Beta Kappa Honor Society. Overall, Fairfield is impressive on the academic front with a 90% first-year retention rate and a 75% four-year graduate rate. It's one of the main reasons Fairfield made my list of top Catholic colleges and universities.

The university also offers students the excitement of NCAA Division I athletics. The Fairfield Stags compete in the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference.

To learn more about the Fairfield University and the school's admissions standards, visit the Fairfield Admissions Profile and the university's official website. If you have visited or attended Fairfield University, please share your impressions below.

Every week I spotlight a great college that might be off the radar of college applicants. If there's a college you'd like to see featured here, please post your recommendation in the College Admissions Forum.

The United States has some amazing colleges and universities affiliated with the Catholic Church. Boston College, Georgetown and Notre Dame all have highly selective admissions, strong academic programs, chapters of Phi Beta Kappa, and well-known Division I athletic teams. And now in the frenzy of March Madness we're seeing several excellent Catholic universities winning a lot more than they're losing, schools such as Xavier, Gonzaga, Siena and Villanova.

I've chosen the schools on my list of the top 22 Catholic colleges and universities using a range of factors including reputation, retention rates, graduation rates, academic quality, value, student engagement and curricular innovations. The schools vary widely in size and institutional type.

If you're wondering what it takes to get into these Catholic colleges and universities, each school on the list is linked to an admission profile that includes acceptance rates, average test scores, costs and other information. You can also check out these tables of data for matriculated students:

• SAT score comparison for top Catholic colleges
• ACT score comparison for top Catholic colleges

Finally, if there's a Catholic college or university that isn't on my list that you think should be, you can share your recommendation with other readers.

As students anxiously await responses from the colleges to which they applied, many will find themselves the recipients of bad news. The country's top colleges and universities send out far more rejection letters than acceptance letters. But is a rejection letter always the end of the road? Is it possible to appeal a rejection?

In the majority of cases, no. A rejection letter means the game is over for that college. However, some schools do allow appeals if a student has significant new information to present, or if the student knows of an administrative error that may have weakened the application. Read this article on appealing a rejection to learn more about legitimate grounds for an appeal and to see a list of circumstances that do not justify an appeal. Also be sure to check out this sample appeal letter.

NAFSA: Association of International Educators announced today the winners of the 2010 Senator Paul Simon Award for Comprehensive Internationalization. Senator Simon was a strong supporter of international education and foreign language study, and the colleges that win the award all show impressive efforts at preparing students to succeed in a global economy and interconnected world.

The five schools being recognized in 2010 for their overall efforts at internationalization are

• Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania
• Hobart & William Smith Colleges in New York
• Loyola University Maryland
• Northeastern University in Massachusetts
• University of San Francisco in California