Today we're gonna be talking about how the U.S. News & World Report calculates their best college rankings every year. Now, the U.S. News & World Report has been ranking colleges on a number of metrics for 35 years. And they're considered to be the best in the industry at this.

So today we're gonna talk about how they get those rankings, what their methodology is, and some disclaimers along with it.

The first disclaimer, to go with this overall is that while these college rankings are, of course, very, very useful, there is definitely no end whether it is all college rankings or how you should choose the best college or university for you based on what you want to study and your dreams.

The first thing that U.S. News & World Report does when determining its college rankings, is that they divide colleges into different categories. That way they're not comparing colleges that might have a very, very different academic mission.

So the way they do that, they break it down into 10 categories.

The first is a national universities.

So these are your Harvards, your Stanfords, your UC Berkeleys, your UCLAs. These are universities that have undergrad majors, but they also have master's programs. They have doctoral programs, and they place a large emphasis on the research that our faculty does. That's category number one.

The second category is the national liberal arts colleges in the United States.

So these are your, Middlebury's, your Swarthmore's, your Pomonas, that focused almost exclusively on undergrad education rather than graduate education and faculty research.

The next four categories after that, that U.S. News & World Report uses are regional universities. So those are universities clumped by either North, South, Midwest, or West in the United States. And these are schools that offer undergrad degrees and graduate degrees, but typically not doctoral programs. And the last four categories are the regional colleges they use.

So similar geographical groupings in the United States use North, South, Midwest, and West, but these are colleges that focus on undergrad education, but less than 50% of their degrees are in liberal arts disciplines.

So with that in mind, U.S. News & World Report doesn't compare apples to oranges. And so within these categories, there is a very specific methodology that US News & World Report uses every year, but it also varies slightly from year to year. So let's talk about it.

The first factor is outcomes. So we're talking about graduation rates, retention rates, graduation rate performance. So what does it look like when a student graduates, what type of careers do they go off to. It also includes social mobility. So the percentage of students who are enrolled in a college as a result of Pell grants, and the graduation rates and graduation rate performance for those Pell grant recipients.

The second factor is faculty resources, which means a couple of different things. The first of which is class size, also faculty salary, the proportion of full-time faculty with the highest degree in their fields, student to faculty ratio, and the proportion of faculty who are full-time.

This is 20% of their ranking. U.S. News considers it to be pretty important in terms of what type of faculty resources are at the disposal of faculty. And what does the competition of that faculty at the school look like?

The next factor used by US News is that they give is only an expert opinion. So, essentially they're taking a lot on the academic reputation of these schools as determined by provosts, by deans of admission, by presidents of different universities, whose opinions go into a two-year weighted average of ratings.

So U. S. News is constantly gathering this data, and in those two-year weighted averages, they determine from all these academic experts, what do they think are the top universities in their field, and within those 10 categories that we talked about earlier.

Another category that U. S. News considers for about 10% of the consideration of their rankings is financial resources. They look at it when they think spending per student can be a pretty good indication of what a college can offer, in terms of services, in terms of quality of education for a student's stay in that university.

The next piece of the puzzle for U.S. News is a category that they call student excellence. Now student excellence, they measure over a variety of indicators, some of which are actually the indicators that these universities use to determine which students they are going to allow into their classes. So those factors include standardized test scores, as well as class standing within a student's high school before they matriculate to that university.

The final U.S. News ranking category, which is a smaller one, it's only 5% of their ranking, is alumni giving. So that's the percentage of living alumni, with bachelor's degrees from that university who decide to give back to their school through donations.

So in conclusion, there's obviously a lot that goes into this annual U.S. New report of college rankings. This was hopefully a little bit of a glimpse into what that methodology looks like within those 10 categories. And remember, there should be a lot more to your college decision than just these rankings. But of course, these rankings can be very useful.

Talking to you about a wide range of categories, from those geographic categories to university and college categories, to specific academic disciplines, departments, and more.