How the College Rankings Work
New for 2008: Some schools switch categories, and we use Pell grant data
There is no way to summarize everything a college has to offer with a single number. But the U.S. News rankings provide an excellent starting point for families because they measure the relative quality of institutions based on widely accepted indicators of excellence. You can compare numbers of schools you are considering at a glance and discover other colleges by looking at schools that are ranked near universities you are researching. If you combine the information in this magazine with college visits, interviews, and your own intuition, our rankings can be a powerful tool in your quest for college.
The U.S. News rankings system rests on two pillars: quantitative measures that education experts have proposed as reliable indicators of academic quality and our nonpartisan view of what matters in education. U.S. News has made several changes this year to improve our methodology and rankings. To sort colleges and universities into the appropriate categories, the 2008 edition of America's Best Colleges uses the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching's recently announced 2006 Basic version of its Carnegie Classifications. The latest revision has resulted in many schools changing from one U.S. News ranking category to another. In addition, some schools, including the U.S. service academies, are ranked for the very first time.
We also added the proportion of the student body receiving Pell grants into our predicted graduation rate formula. Pell grants are an important indicator of how many low-income students attend a school, and adding them resulted in a model that better captures the school's student body and improves that indicator.
How does the methodology work? First, schools are categorized by mission and, in some cases, by region. The national universities offer a full range of undergraduate majors, plus master's and Ph.D. programs, and emphasize faculty research. The liberal arts colleges focus almost exclusively on undergraduate education. They award at least 50 percent of their degrees in the arts and sciences. Next, we gather data from each college for up to 15 indicators of academic excellence. Each factor is assigned a weight that reflects our judgment about how much a measure matters. Finally, the colleges in each category are ranked against their peers, based on their composite weighted score. (A more detailed explanation is available on the U.S. News website, www.usnews.com.)
Most of the data come from the colleges--and U.S. News takes pains to ensure their accuracy. This year, 92.4 percent of the schools we surveyed returned information. We obtained missing data from sources such as the American Association of University Professors, the National Collegiate Athletic Association, the Council for Aid to Education, and the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics. Data that did not come from this year's survey are footnoted. Estimates may be used when schools fail to report particular data points. The complete lists of the college rankings, along with data for unranked schools, can be found at www.usnews.com/collegerankings.
How can you best use our rankings? Mining the data for the information you need can definitely inform your thinking. The hard work is up to you.
This story appears in the August 27, 2007 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.