News release SWOCC.  OnlineColleges.com ranks Southwestern Oregon Community College as the top Oregon college that offers distance education. In a 2016 study, Southwestern Oregon Community College ranked as the No. 1 college out of 42 schools in Oregon that offer online classes or degree programs. The analysis was conducted by OnlineColleges.com, a website that provides reliable information about top online colleges and degree programs by featuring school rankings, program guides and career outlooks. Southwestern offers online coursework in a wide range of subjects, such as health care, business and anthropology. Out of all the colleges in Oregon that provide online education, Southwestern ranked second for the number of online programs it offers. The college also ranked ninth for the percent of its student body participating in online education, with more than 55% of students enrolled in an online class. OnlineColleges.com uses publicly available data and a custom methodology to rank over 2,500 different schools, on a variety of different criteria. The “Top Colleges Tool” is totally ad free, and is a purely editorial resource to help users find a school that matches what they’re looking for. To generate the ranking, OnlineColleges.com sourced data from the National Center for Education Statistics to evaluate schools on multiple criteria. These include the number of online programs the school offers, the percentage of students studying online, the average cost of in-state and out-of-state tuition, and student services, among others. Visit OnlineColleges.com to learn more about the methodology and see the ranking of Oregon schools. Visitwww.socc.edu/distance to learn more about Southwestern’s online programs.