Morse Code: Inside the College Rankings

Since 1997, U.S. News has published a measure called "graduation rate performance." It's a way to acknowledge that some colleges and universities are doing a better job than expected in graduating their students. It counts for 5 percent of the total model for the National Universities and Liberal Arts Colleges rankings.

For the 2008 edition of America's Best Colleges, we added the percentage of Pell grant recipients as part of this computation. One of the criticisms about our rankings had been that our system didn't encourage schools to take low-income, at-risk students and that the only way to do well in the rankings is to buy students with high SAT/ACT scores through merit scholarships. Many colleges and universities have the mission of educating high percentages of students who are from low-income families, who tend to have lower graduation rates than non-Pell grant students. By including Pell grant data in the graduation rate performance calculation, schools (with high Pell grant percentages) will now get credit in our methodology for educating their low-income students because they will now do better in the graduation rate performance indicator than they did before we made this change.

Continue reading »