The College Rankings Are Coming
It's getting very close to the launch of the next America's Best Colleges rankings: The 2009 edition is going to be published on Friday, August 22, the day that the new rankings go live on our website. The site will have the most complete version of the rankings, tables, and lists, and have extensive profiles on each school. The America's Best Colleges website also will have wide-ranging interactivity and search features to enable students and parents to find the school that best fits their needs.
These exclusive rankings will also be published in the magazine's September 1-8 issue and a newsstand guidebook, both of which will go on sale beginning Monday, August 25. The main rankings include the national universities and liberal arts colleges. In addition, there will be two new rankings. The first will be a list of "Up and Coming Institutions"—the colleges making innovative improvements. The second will be our first-ever rankings of colleges by public high school counselors. In addition, we will be publishing our second annual ranking of Historically Black Colleges and Universities.
There will also tables on:
- Top public universities
- Economic diversity on campus
- Ethnic diversity on campus
- Where applying early may help
- Schools that award the most (and least) need-based aid
- Schools whose freshmen are least (and most) likely to return
- Highest graduation rate
- Highest proportion of classes under 20
- Most international students
- Top undergraduate business programs
- Top undergraduate engineering programs.
The Top 100 Lists highlight characteristics to consider when deciding which college is right for you. They include schools with the:
- Highest acceptance rates
- Highest four-year graduation rates
- Most students living in university housing
- Most students in fraternities and sororities
- Most students receiving merit aid
- Most students studying abroad
- Most transfer students
- Most students over age 25
- Most students commuting to campus.
In addition, we have lists and tables that will help you navigate the college application process. They include:
- "A+ Schools for B Students" for students who want to go to a good college but don't have straight-A grades
- "Best Values" to show which schools offer you the best education for the least amount of money
- "National Survey of Student Engagement" to see what students have to say about their colleges and universities
- "Majors Lists" to determine which schools offer which majors
- "Student Indebtedness," a list of the schools whose students in the class of 2007 graduated with the heaviest and lightest debt loads
- "Academic Programs to Look for," which notes schools that are outstanding examples of academic programs believed to enhance a student's education.
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Reader Comments
I would have to disagree that the rankings are "more or less on the money." The rankings are highly skewed in favor of private schools. Also, when you look at the rankings for best graduate schools, there seems to be a disconnect. Where I think there is an obvious flaw in the rankings is when you look at schools such as UC Berkeley and the University of Michigan. It just seems like a far stretch to think that schools such as Vanderbilt U., Washington U., and some of the other higher ranked schools, are really better than these two public universities. Just look at US News' ranking of best graduate programs and see how many top 10 programs that UC Berkeley and the University of Michigan have. In my opinion, these two public universities are two of the top 10 universities in the nation. Unfortunately, the inherent bias in US New and World Reports rankings will never reflect this.
Please include the rankings for this program
Of late, the demand for Financial Engineering / Computational Finance masters program has grown phenomenally. Could you please include the university rankings for this program too?
It's true that one shouldn't solely base his or her college choice solely on the sometimes borderline random rankings that the US News spits out annually, but if one looks at the rankings and follows the schools from worse ranked to higher ranked to elite (the schools that comprise the top 20), the rankings are more or less on the money. In other words, a top 31 school like Lehigh is no Carnegie Mellon (ranked 22), which is not in the same academic or prestige level of Ivy-Leauge Cornell (ranked 12), which we all know is not quite like a world-renowned Harvard (ranked 2). With a wary eye, the rankings can be used to see approximately how academically excellent (prestige, SAT's, acceptance rates, research,etc.) a school really is.
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