The primary format of debate we participate in at PLNU is NPDA (National Parliamentary Debate Association) debate, and they have two official reporting dates for posting their national rankings. For the first official ranking period that ended December 15th, looking back on the Fall 2014 tournament results for the hundreds of schools across the country competing, regardless of school size, scholarship amounts, or institutional endowments, PLNU is ranked in the number 3 spot in the nation! This includes much larger schools like SDSU, and CSULB, or UCLA, and highly prestigious research schools like Cal Berkeley, along with many large and highly competitive community colleges, and other strong Christian colleges and universities like Wheaton and Cedarville, not to mention (though I guess I will) other well respected colleges like Pepperdine and Rice universities.
When you look over the last 20 years in a time line study for an idea on how schools consistently compete against one another in the NPDA, PLNU debate is ranked as the number one program in the nation by a fairly wide margin, having been named National Champions at the end of the year half a dozen times, including having earned multiple year long sweepstakes champion titles, National Tournament Sweepstakes Champions, Top two person team at Nationals out of over 300 teams competing, and Top Speaker in the nation at nationals competing with over 600 of the nations best debaters at Nationals. By the way, many of these top honors were accomplished by home schooled recruits, with or without high school forensics experience prior to joining us. !