Entries for August 2009

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.

The new America's Best Colleges 2010 edition rankings go live on August 20. How does U.S. News ensure the integrity of the data and the rankings that we publish?

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

First step: U.S. News uses definitions of the data that have been developed by experts in higher education to achieve data comparability among schools and other publishers. As in the past, the ranking data questions contained in the statistical questionnaires we sent to colleges in the spring and summer of 2009 either follow the standardized format in the Common Data Set or conform to definitions used by the U.S. Department of Education or other higher-education organizations.