The U.S. News Best Colleges rankings can help prospective students and their families compare institutions as they look for the best fit. (GETTY IMAGES)
There are plenty of reasons students attend a particular college or university. But the top ones, according to several different surveys, like Why Higher Ed? by Strada and Gallup and Factors That Influence Student College Choice by the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics, relate to academic reputation, cost of attending and return on investment.
Taking this into account, U.S. News & World Report made refinements to this year's rankings formula by dropping five longstanding factors, modifying the weights of several other factors, and introducing a few new ones. We increased the emphasis on how often schools' students from all socioeconomic backgrounds earned degrees and took advantage of information on graduate outcomes that was not available until recently. As in past years, changes in methodology, together with changes in individual schools' data, can result in significant changes to schools' rankings.
The underlying data used to compute these measures was collected from third-party sources (see the "Data Sources" section below), and oftentimes reported directly by schools to U.S. News in alignment with what they recently reported to the government and/or following Common Data Set (CDS) initiative guidance.
U.S. News evaluated nearly 1,500 U.S. four-year bachelor's degree-granting institutions on as many as 19 measures for its 39th rankings edition. These statistics only pertain to measures reflecting academic quality and graduate outcomes – factors that are universally important to prospective students. But also important are considerations that vary person-to-person, like campus culture, strength in specific majors and financial aid offered. To account for this, U.S. News supplements its overall rankings with specialized subject and cost-oriented rankings, customizable search tools, education journalism, and a detailed school directory with exclusive academic and nonacademic information.
In short, the rankings should be used as a tool for discovering the best fit schools; combined with personal considerations and additional resources.
Eligibility
As always, schools' eligibility to be ranked was not contingent on their participation in U.S. News' surveys. But the vast majority of schools U.S. News surveyed did report data to U.S. News – including 99 of the top 100 ranked National Universities and 97 of the top 100 National Liberal Arts Colleges.
To be ranked, institutions had to meet the following conditions: have regional accreditation, be included in Carnegie's Basic classification but not designated as a "highly specialized" school, enroll at least 100 undergraduate students, have reported financial expenditures data to the U.S. Department of Education's Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) finance survey, and have reported a six-year graduation rate of full-time, first-year bachelor’s degree-seeking students in recent years. Surveyed schools not passing all of these criteria are listed as unranked.
Institutions were not surveyed nor listed in the Best Colleges directory if they lacked accreditation, lacked first-year students or were entirely distance education, although accredited distance education degree programs were surveyed for U.S. News' Best Online Bachelor's Programs rankings.
How Ranks Are Determined
We calculated 10 distinct overall rankingswhere colleges and universities were compared with schools that shared their academic missions:
- National Universities offer a range of undergraduate majors, plus master's and doctoral programs, and emphasize faculty research or award professional practice doctorates.
- National Liberal Arts Colleges focus almost exclusively on undergraduate education and award at least 50% of their degrees in the arts and sciences.
- Regional Universities offer a broad scope of undergraduate degrees and some master's degree programs but few, if any, doctoral programs. We ranked them in four geographical groups: North, South, Midwest and West.
- Regional Colleges focus on undergraduate education but grant fewer than 50% of their degrees in liberal arts disciplines. Some regional colleges award two-year associate degrees as well as bachelor's degrees. We ranked them in four geographical groups: North, South, Midwest and West.
The above were mapped for the second consecutive year with The Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education's 2021 update to its Basic Classification system (see details here).
Within each ranking, there were ranking factors – outlined below – for which each eligible school was scored on the underlying data. These scores were standardized (z-scored) so they were compared with the means and standard deviations among all other ranked schools. In other words, the distance between two schools on any ranking factor is not determined by how their data compare head-to-head so much as how their data compared with every ranked school.
Next, the standardized values were weighted and totaled to determine the overall score from which the rankings were derived. The overall scores were rescaled so that the top performer(s) in each ranking displays an overall score of 100. Others' overall scores are on a 0-99 scale reflecting the distance from their ranking's top-performing school(s). Those placing outside the top 90% are still ranked but display their ranking's bottom decile range (e.g., No. 118-130) instead of their individual ranks (e.g., No. 126); this is a change from previous years when the top 75% were numerically ranked and the bottom 25% were in the ranking range.
The Ranking Factors
Below is an outline of the ranking factors. For a deeper dive into how the ranking factors were calculated, including the new ones, see the article, "A More Detailed Look at the Ranking Factors." Also see the Morse Code: Inside the College Rankingsblog for insights behind these changes.
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