How we rank schools
Our method and information-packed tables serve families well
Can rankings help you identify colleges and universities that are right for you? Certainly, the college experience consists of a host of intangibles that cannot be reduced to mere numbers. But we believe that it is possible to objectively compare schools on one key attribute: academic excellence. The tables that appear on the following pages should help you weigh some of the relative strengths and weaknesses of the schools that you're considering.
In studying the tables it's important to remember that their best use is for comparing colleges within a category. Since we may change our methodology from year to year, we do not invite readers to track colleges' annual moves in the rankings. This year, for instance, while we did not alter our ranking formula, we recategorized many schools. Why? In late 2000, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching released an updated version of its Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, a grouping system that U.S. News has used as the basis for its ranking categories since 1983. In short, if Carnegie moved a school from one category to another, we also switched the school into the new category.
In addition, U.S. News this year changed the names of our ranking categories to better reflect their missions, as described by the Carnegie classification system. Our old "national universities" grouping has become "national universities-doctoral"; "national liberal arts" has become "liberal arts colleges-bachelor's"; "regional universities" has become "universities-master's," and "regional liberal arts" has become "comprehensive colleges-bachelor's." In this issue we provide the top tier for each category; information on the other schools can be found in the America's Best Colleges guidebook and at usnews.com.
The national universities-doctoral offer a full range of undergraduate majors, plus master's and Ph.D. degrees, and emphasize faculty research (Page 106). The liberal arts colleges-bachelor's focus almost exclusively on undergraduate education (Page 108). They award at least 50 percent of their degrees in the liberal arts. The universities-master's offer a full range of undergraduate degrees and some master's degree programs but few, if any, doctoral programs (Page 110). The comprehensive colleges-bachelor's focus on undergraduate education (Page 114) but grant fewer than 50 percent of their degrees in liberal arts disciplines. The universities-master's and comprehensive colleges-bachelor's categories are further subdivided by geographic area--North, South, Midwest, and West.
Switchover. In total, about 200 schools switched U.S. News ranking categories as a result of the changes made to the Carnegie system. Moreover, approximately 50 new schools were added to the rankings. If a school jumped ranking categories or is new to the rankings this year, it has been footnoted on the ranking tables.
The method that U.S. News uses to rank colleges and universities consists of three basic steps. First, the schools are categorized by mission and, in some cases, also by region, and we gather data from each on up to 16 indicators of academic excellence. Second, each factor is assigned a weight that reflects our judgment about how much each measure matters. Finally, the colleges in each category are ranked against their peers, based on their composite weighted score. We publish the ranks of the top schools; the others are grouped into tiers.
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