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U.S. News Methodology
The indicators include input measures that reflect a school's student body, its faculty and its financial resources, along with outcome measures that signal how well the institution educates students.
The measures, their weights in the ranking formula and an explanation of each follow.
Graduation and retention rates (22.5 percent): The higher the proportion of first-year students who return to campus for sophomore year and eventually graduate, the better a school is apt to be at offering the classes and services that students need to succeed.
This measure has two components: six-year graduation rate (80 percent of the score) and first-year retention rate (20 percent). The graduation rate indicates the average proportion of a graduating class earning a degree in six years or less; we consider first-year student classes that started from fall 2006 through fall 2009. First-year retention indicates the average proportion of first-year students who entered the school in the fall 2011 through fall 2014 and returned the following fall.
Undergraduate academic reputation (22.5 percent): The U.S. News ranking formula gives weight to the opinions of those in a position to judge a school's undergraduate academic excellence. The academic peer assessment survey allows top academics – presidents, provosts and deans of admissions – to account for intangibles at peer institutions, such as faculty dedication to teaching.
To get another set of important opinions on National Universities and National Liberal Arts Colleges, U.S. News also surveyed 2,200 counselors at public high schools, each of which was a gold, silver or bronze medal winner in a recent edition of the U.S. News Best High Schools rankings. The counselors surveyed represent every state and the District of Columbia.
Each academic and counselor surveyed was asked to rate schools' academic programs on a scale from 1 (marginal) to 5 (distinguished). Those who didn't know enough about a school to evaluate it fairly were asked to mark "don't know."
The score used in the rankings is the average score of those who rated the school on the 5-point scale; "don't knows" are not counted as part of the average. To reduce the impact of strategic voting by respondents, U.S. News eliminated the two highest and two lowest scores each school received before calculating the average score.
The academic peer assessment score in this year's rankings is based on the results from surveys in spring 2015 and spring 2016.
Both the Regional Universities and Regional Colleges rankings rely on one assessment score, by the academic peer group, for this measure in the rankings formula. In the case of National Universities and National Liberal Arts Colleges, the academic peer assessment accounts for 15 percentage points of the weighting in the ranking methodology, and 7.5 percentage points go to the high school counselors' ratings.
The results from the three most recent years of counselor surveys, from spring 2014, spring 2015 and spring 2016, were averaged to compute the high school counselor reputation score. This was done to increase the number of ratings each college received from the high school counselors and to reduce the year-to-year volatility in the average counselor score.
Ipsos Public Affairs collected the data in spring 2016. Of the 4,635 academics who were sent questionnaires, 39 percent responded. This response rate is down very slightly from the 40 percent response rate in spring 2015 and the 42 percent response rate to the surveys conducted in spring 2014 and spring 2013.
The counselors' one-year response rate was 9 percent for the spring 2016 surveys, up slightly from 7 percent in spring 2015.
Faculty resources (20 percent): Research shows that the more satisfied students are about their contact with professors, the more they will learn and the more likely they are to graduate. U.S. News uses five factors from the 2015-2016 academic year to assess a school's commitment to instruction.
Class size is 40 percent of this measure. Schools receive the most credit in this index for their proportion of undergraduate classes with fewer than 20 students. Classes with 20-29 students score second highest; those with 30-39 students, third highest; and those with 40-49 students, fourth highest. Classes that have 50 or more students receive no credit.
Faculty salary (35 percent) is the average faculty pay, plus benefits, during the 2014-2015 and 2015-2016 academic years, adjusted for regional differences in the cost of living using indexes from the consulting firm Runzheimer International. U.S. News also weighs the proportion of professors with the highest degree in their fields (15 percent), the student-faculty ratio (5 percent) and the proportion of faculty who are full time (5 percent).
Student selectivity (12.5 percent): A school's academic atmosphere is determined in part by students' abilities and ambitions.
This measure has three components. U.S. News factors in the admissions test scores for all enrollees who took the critical reading and math portions of the SAT and the composite ACT score (65 percent of the selectivity score).
U.S. News also considers the proportion of enrolled first-year students at National Universities and National Liberal Arts Colleges who graduated in the top 10 percent of their high school classes or the proportion of enrolled first-year students at Regional Universities and Regional Colleges who graduated in the top quarter of their classes (25 percent).
The third component is the acceptance rate, or the ratio of students admitted to applicants (10 percent).
The data are all for the fall 2015 entering class. While the ranking calculation takes account of both the SAT and ACT scores of all entering students, the ranking tables on usnews.com display the score range for whichever test most students took.
U.S. News use footnotes online to indicate schools that did not report to U.S. News the fall 2015 SAT and ACT scores for all first-time, first-year, degree-seeking students for whom the schools had data. Schools sometimes fail to report SAT and ACT scores for students in these specific categories: athletes, international students, minority students, legacies, those admitted by special arrangement and those who started in summer 2015.
U.S. News also uses footnotes to indicate schools that declined to tell U.S. News whether all students with SAT and ACT test scores were represented.
For schools that did not report all scores or that declined to say whether all scores were reported, U.S. News reduced the value of their SAT and ACT scores in the Best Colleges ranking model by 15 percent. This practice is not new; since the 1997 rankings, U.S. News has discounted the value of such schools' reported scores in the ranking model, because the effect of leaving students out could be that lower scores are omitted.
If a school told U.S. News that it included all students with scores in its reported SAT and ACT scores, then those scores were counted fully in the rankings and were not footnoted.
If less than 75 percent of the fall 2015 entering class submitted SAT and ACT scores, their test scores were discounted by 15 percent in the ranking calculations. U.S. News also used this policy in the 2016 edition of the rankings.
Financial resources (10 percent): Generous per-student spending indicates that a college can offer a wide variety of programs and services. U.S. News measures financial resources by using the average spending per student on instruction, research, student services and related educational expenditures in the 2014 and 2015 fiscal years. Spending on sports, dorms and hospitals doesn't count.
Graduation rate performance (7.5 percent): This indicator of added value shows the effect of the college's programs and policies on the graduation rate of students after controlling for spending and student characteristics, such as test scores and the proportion receiving Pell Grants. U.S. News measures the difference between a school's six-year graduation rate for the class that entered in 2009 and the rate U.S. News had predicted for the class.
If the school's actual graduation rate for the 2009 entering class is higher than the rate U.S. News predicted for that same class, then the college is enhancing achievement, or overperforming. If a school's actual graduation rate is lower than the U.S. News prediction, then it is underperforming.
Alumni giving rate (5 percent): This reflects the average percentage of living alumni with bachelor's degrees who gave to their school during 2013-2014 and 2014-2015, which is an indirect measure of student satisfaction.
To arrive at a school's rank, U.S. News first calculated the weighted sum of its standardized scores. The final scores were rescaled so that the top school in each category received a value of 100, and the other schools' weighted scores were calculated as a proportion of that top score. Final scores were rounded to the nearest whole number and ranked in descending order. Schools that are tied appear in alphabetical order and are marked as tied on all ranking tables.
