Many prospective college students and their parents believe that an ethnically diverse student body enhances the education of every pupil on campus. A university is truly diverse if there are many different ethnic groups enrolled on campus and those groups have around the same percentage of students enrolled. In other words, if a college has only one ethnic group that makes up the vast percentage of its entire student body, it's not very diverse, even though it might have many other ethnic groups represented in very small percentages.

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U.S. News has made some significant changes this year to the presentation and ranking methodology for our Best Colleges rankings. The full rankings will be available at www.usnews.com/college as of August 17. Here is a brief summary of the changes:

The 2011 Best Colleges rankings go live on August 17. How does U.S. News ensure the integrity of the data and the rankings that we publish?

We have a five-step process we use before the rankings are published.

The American Bar Association recently published a very detailed "Report of the Special Committee on the U.S. News and World Report Rankings" organized by the ABA's Section on Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar to "examine rankings of law schools."

As I mentioned earlier this month, U.S. News and Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions have worked together to give two live Webcasts on the U.S. News Best Law Schools and Best Business Schools rankings. Part of the broadcasts included PowerPoint presentations that provided prospective law and business school students significant insights into the rankings and how to best use the rankings in their graduate school application process.

It's getting very close to the launch of the new Best Colleges rankings. The 2011 edition will be published on Tuesday, August 17, which is the day the new rankings go live online. The site will have the most complete version of the rankings, tables, and lists, and it will have extensive statistical profiles on each school. The Best Colleges Web site also will have wide-ranging interactivity, a college search, and school profiles to enable students and parents to find the school that best fits their needs. These exclusive rankings will also be published in our newsstand guidebook and in the magazine's September 2011 issue, both of which will go on sale later in August.

U.S. News and Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions have teamed up to give two separate, free live web broadcasts on the U.S. News rankings. The first one, on the Best Law Schools rankings, is called Inside the Law School Rankings with U.S. News & World Report and will held on July 22 at 9 p.m. ET. The second one, on the Best Business Schools rankings, is called Inside the Business School Rankings with U.S. News & World Report and will be held on July 27 at 9 p.m. ET. U.S. News hopes these unique webcasts will provide prospective law and business school students insights into the rankings and how to best use them in their own graduate school application process.