Entries for November 2008

U.S. News has just published our first World's Best Colleges and Universities rankings. These rankings are based on data from the Times Higher Education-QS World University Rankings which were produced in association with QS Quacquarelli Symonds. One of the world's leading networks for careers and education, QS Quacquarelli Symonds has been publishing world rankings since 2004.

The World's Best Colleges and Universities rankings include the following rankings: Top 200 Universities Worldwide, the Top 30 Asian Universities, the Top 30 European Universities, the Top 20 Canadian Universities, and the Top 20 Australian and New Zealand Universities. The listing also includes the Top 50 global rankings in the fields of arts and humanities; engineering and IT; life sciences and biomedicine; natural sciences; and social sciences.

On December 5, U.S. News will publish online our second annual America's Best High Schools rankings of public high schools in the United States. This year, we hope to expand these rankings to include 47 states. This will be an increase from last year, which covered public high schools in 41 states. The rankings will reach newsstands on December 8 in the magazine issue dated December 15-22. Also new this year will be the inclusion of how well schools do on the International Baccalaureate tests, which were not part of last year's analysis.

To produce America's Best High Schools rankings, U.S. News teams up with School Evaluation Services, a K-12 education data research business run by Standard & Poor's. SES developed the comprehensive methodology, which determines how well high schools serve all their students, not just those who are collegebound.

Briefly, how will these upcoming rankings be done? We plan to analyze all public high schools in 47 states using data from the 2006-2007 school year. A three-step process determines the best high schools. The first two steps will ensure that the schools serve all their students well, using state proficiency standards as the measuring benchmarks. For the schools that make it past the first two steps, a third step assesses "college readiness"—the degree to which schools prepared students for college-level work using Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate tests. A much more detailed America's Best High Schools methodology will be published when the rankings come out in early December 2008.