How We Calculate the College Rankings

Schools are unranked and listed separately for America's Best Colleges 2010 if they have indicated that they don't use the SAT or ACT test scores in admissions decisions for first-time, first-year, degree-seeking applicants. In a few cases, they are unranked if their school didn't receive enough responses from other academics on the peer assessment survey to allow us to use their peer score as part of the overall ranking.

Other schools were unranked for the following reasons: a total enrollment of fewer than 200 students; a vast proportion of nontraditional students; no first-year students (these are sometimes called upper-division schools). We did not rank a few specialized schools in arts, business, or engineering.

Sources, sources ... Most of the data come from the colleges—and U.S. News takes pains to ensure their accuracy. This year, 91.2 percent of the 1,477 colleges and universities we surveyed returned their statistical information. We obtained missing data from sources such as the American Association of University Professors, the National Collegiate Athletic Association, the Council for Aid to Education, and the Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics. Data that did not come from this year's survey are footnoted. Estimates, which are never published by U.S. News, may be used when schools fail to report particular data points. Missing data are reported as N/A in the ranking tables.

The indicators we use to capture academic quality fall into seven categories: assessment by administrators at peer institutions, retention of students, faculty resources, student selectivity, financial resources, alumni giving, and (for national universities and liberal arts colleges) "graduation rate performance," the difference between the proportion of students expected to graduate and the proportion who actually do. The indicators include input measures that reflect a school's student body, its faculty, and its financial resources, along with outcome measures that signal how well the institution does its job of educating students. Following are detailed descriptions of the indicators used to measure academic quality:

Peer assessment (weighting: 25 percent). The U.S. News ranking formula gives greatest weight to the opinions of those in a position to judge a school's undergraduate academic excellence. The peer assessment survey allows the top academics we consult—presidents, provosts, and deans of admissions—to account for intangibles such as faculty dedication to teaching. Each individual is asked to rate peer schools' academic programs on a 5-point scale from 1 (marginal) to 5 (distinguished). Those who don't know enough about a school to evaluate it fairly are asked to mark "don't know." The peer score used in the rankings is the average score of those who rated the school on the 5-point scale; don't knows are not counted as part of the average. In order to reduce the impact of strategic voting by respondents, before calculating the average score we eliminated the two highest and two lowest votes each school received. Synovate, an opinion-research firm based near Chicago, in spring 2009 collected the data; of the 4,273 people who were sent questionnaires, 48 percent responded. This is up slightly from last year's 46 percent response rate.

Retention (20 percent in national universities and liberal arts colleges and 25 percent in master's and baccalaureate colleges). The higher the proportion of freshmen who return to campus the following year and eventually graduate, the better a school is apt to be at offering the classes and services that students need to suc ceed. This measure has two components: six-year graduation rate (80 percent of the retention score) and freshman retention rate (20 percent). The graduation rate indicates the average proportion of a graduating class who earned a degree in six years or less; we consider freshman classes that started from 1999 through 2002. Freshman retention indicates the average proportion of freshmen who entered the school in the fall of 2004 through fall 2007 and returned the following fall.