Rating America's Colleges

Rating America's Colleges

The annual rankings can help you pick the right school for your needs

The publication of surveys rating the quality of American colleges and universities has become something of a cottage industries in recent years, but no guide is more eagerly awaited by students and parents each year than U.S News & World Report's rankings of America's best colleges.

To compile its ratings, U.S. News groups some 1,500 accredited colleges and universities into 14 categories of size, geographic whereabouts, educational orientation, using guidelines adapted from the Carnegie Foundation for Advancement of Teaching. It then surveys thousands of college presidents, deans and admissions directors around the country for their assessment of the quality of peer institutions and combines that reputational data with objective information on an institution's selectivity in admissions, graduation rates, faculty resources, financial resources,  alumni satisfaction to arrive at rankings for schools in the different categories.

No ranking system can ever produce a wholly accurate measure of an institution's quality, of course, and a college that's appropriate for one student may be a poor match for another. The U.S. News survey is but one tool in helping students and their families pick the right college for their circumstances. Highlights of the U.S. News can be found in Internet.

America's College. Photo by Elena

A Further Word on Methodology

The U.S. News for methodology for ranking colleges and universities has two components: a reputationasl survey taken among college administrators, together with a collection of more objective statistical measures of an institution's educational quality.

Reputation: According to U.S. News, college presidents, deans and admissions directors from more than 1400 schools participate in surveys of academic reputations. Participants are asked to score institutions in the category to which their own schools belong. The respondents are expected to assign each school to one of four quartiles based upon their assessment of a school's academic quality, and an average score is computed for each school.

Student selectivity: In measuring selectivity, the survey takes into account the acceptance rate and actual enrollment of students offered places in the admissions process, the enrollees' high-school class ranks, and the average of midpoint combined scores on the SATs or ACTs.

Faculty Resources: Faculty resources are judged by the ratio of full-time students to full-time faculty, excluding certain professional schools, as well as the percentage of full-time faculty with Ph.D.'s or other top terminal degrees, the percentage of part-time faculty, the average salary and benefits for tenured full professors, and the size of the undergraduate classes.

Financial Strength: This is calculated by dividing the institution's total expenditures for its education program, including such things as instruction, student services, libraries and computers, and administration by the total/full time enrollment.

Alumni satisfaction This is a measure only weighed in national universities and national liberal arts categories. It was derived from the average percentage of alumni giving during the two previous years. The  data on alumni satisfaction do not appear in the tables that follow to space reasons, but were a factor in compiling the overall rankings.

The Best Values on Campus

The best faculty and educational program in the world won't matter to you if you can't afford them. To enable families to relate the cost of attending to the quality of the education involved, U.S. News & World Report developed a "best value" rating system that identifies colleges and universities that score high on overall quality as well as reasonableness of cost. The "best values" are based on an institution's "sticker price", the published price for tuition, room, board, and fees. For many students the actual price of attending that college will be less because of merit awards and need-based grants.