There are several explanations for why students choose to attend a specific college or institution. However, the most important ones are related to academic reputation, cost of attendance, and return on investment, according to a number of surveys, including 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.
In light of this, U.S. News & World Report modified the weights of multiple established factors, added a few new ones, and eliminated five long-standing ones from this year’s rankings system. We brought greater attention to the frequency with which students from all socioeconomic levels graduated from schools and made use of data on graduate outcomes that had not been accessible until recently.
The underlying information utilized to calculate these metrics was gathered from outside sources (refer to the “Data Sources” section below), and frequently, schools provided it to U.S. News directly in accordance with their most recent government reports and/or in accordance with guidelines provided by the Common Data Set (CDS) initiative.
For its 39th edition of rankings, U.S. News assessed approximately 1,500 four-year bachelor’s degree-granting institutions in the United States using up to 19 different metrics. Only metrics that represent graduate outcomes and academic quality—aspects that are often significant to potential students—are included in these figures. Individual factors such as school culture, emphasis on particular majors, and availability of financial help are also significant. In order to address this, U.S. News has cost- and subject-specific rankings in addition to its overall rankings, as well as search options that can be customized.
To put it briefly, the rankings ought to be utilized in conjunction with extra resources and individual considerations to help identify the schools that best suit students.
Qualifications
As usual, colleges did not have to participate in U.S. News surveys to be eligible to be ranked. However, the great majority of the institutions that U.S. News surveyed—including 99 of the top 100 National Universities and 97 of the top 100 National Liberal Arts Colleges—did provide data to U.S. News.
The following requirements had to be met for an institution to be ranked: it had to be regionally accredited, fall under Carnegie’s Basic classification (without being classified as a “highly specialized”), enroll at least 100 undergraduate students, report financial expenditures to the U.S. Department of Education’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) finance survey, and report a six-year graduation rate of full-time, first-year students seeking a bachelor’s degree in the previous year. Schools that were surveyed but did not meet every requirement are marked as unranked.
While approved distance education degree programs were surveyed for U.S. News’ Best Online Bachelor’s Programs rankings, institutions that were not accredited, did not have any first-year students, or were only distance education were neither surveyed nor listed in the Best Colleges directory.
How Ranks Are Determined
We calculated 10 distinct overall rankings where 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 aforementioned were mapped using the 2021 update to The Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education’s Basic Classification system for the second year in a row (see details here).
Each eligible school was given a score based on the underlying statistics for each ranking factor, which are listed below. Because these results were standardized (z-scored), they could be compared to the means and standard deviations of all other institutions that were graded. Put another way, the difference between two schools on any ranking criteria is more closely based on how their data compares with all ranked institutions than it is on how well they compare head-to-head.
- The next step was to weight and sum the standardized values to get the overall score, which served as the basis for ranking. In order to give the best performer(s) in each ranking an overall score of 100, the overall ratings were rescaled. Other people’s total scores range from 0 to 99, which indicates how far they are from the best-performing school or schools in their ranking. As opposed to their individual ranks (e.g., No. 126), those who place outside the top 90% are still ranked but show their ranking’s bottom decile range (e.g., No. 118-130); this is a difference from prior years when the top 75% were numerically ranked and the lowest 25% were in the ranking range.
The Elements of Ranking
An overview of the ranking factors is shown below. See the article “A More Detailed Look at the Ranking Factors” for a more thorough explanation of the methodology used to determine the ranking factors, including the new ones. For more on the reasoning behind these modifications, check out the blog Morse Code: Inside the College Rankings.