How U.S. News Calculated the 2018 Best Colleges Rankings

The host of intangibles that make up the college experience can't be measured by a series of data points. But for families concerned with finding the best academic value for their money, the U.S. News Best Colleges rankings provide an excellent starting point for the college search.

The rankings allow you to compare at a glance the relative quality of U.S. institutions based on such widely accepted indicators of excellence as first-year student retention and graduation rates and the strength of the faculty. And as you check out the data for colleges already on your short list, you may discover unfamiliar schools with similar metrics and thus broaden your options. 

Many factors other than those spotlighted here will factor into your decision, including location and the feel of campus life; the range of academic offerings, activities and sports; and cost and the availability of financial aid. But if you combine the information on usnews.com with college visits, interviews and your own intuition, the U.S. News rankings can be a powerful tool in your quest for the right college. 

How the Methodology Works 

The U.S. News ranking system rests on two pillars. The formula uses exclusively statistical quantitative and qualitative measures that education experts have proposed as reliable indicators of academic quality, and it is based on U.S. News' researched view of what matters in education. 

To calculate the rankings, U.S. News gathers data from each college on up to 15 indicators of academic excellence. For more details on the variables used, see the "Ranking Model Indicators" section below.

The indicators are scored, normalized and assigned weights that reflect U.S. News' judgment about how much the measures matter. Next, the weighted values are summed and transformed so that each eligible school receives an overall score between 0 and 100, with the top school(s) in each category scoring 100. Finally, colleges and universities are ranked against their peers in descending order of their overall scores.

Schools with equal overall scores are marked as tied in the rankings and display in alphabetical order.

U.S. News chooses to only publish the individual overall ranks of schools placing within the top 75 percent of their categories. However, all listed schools – except those categorized as "Unranked" – have an overall score and rank calculated.

To learn what is new in this year's rankings, see the Best Colleges Rankings FAQ.

Unranked Schools 

Schools that are published as Unranked in each ranking category were not assessed for a ranking but met the criteria for U.S. News to survey them and include them in the searchable directory of colleges. They are Unranked because they met at least one of the following conditions:

• They reported not using either SAT or ACT scores in admissions decisions for first-time, first-year, degree-seeking applicants. Note: Schools with test-optional or test-flexible admissions policies still use these SAT and ACT scores in their admissions process, if prospective students provide them, and those schools are included in the rankings.
• They are in a Carnegie Classification that U.S. News has not included in its ranking categories, including 84 highly specialized schools in arts, business and engineering.
• They enroll a large proportion of nontraditional students, which is the situation at upper-division schools.
• Too few respondents rated them in the 2016 and 2017 peer assessment surveys. Meeting this condition is rare.
• They have a total enrollment of fewer than 200 undergraduate and graduate students. Meeting this condition is rare.

In total, 138 colleges in the National Universities, National Liberal Arts Colleges, Regional Universities and Regional Colleges categories are listed as Unranked.

Separate from those that are Unranked, U.S. schools that award bachelor's degrees are excluded entirely from the Best Colleges section of usnews.com if they are only nationally accredited or have no accreditation, are branch campuses whose accreditation is through a parent institution or are graduate schools that only award bachelor's degree through degree completion programs.

Grouping Ranked Colleges

U.S. News categorizes regionally accredited schools by their mission, which is derived from the breakdown of types of higher education institutions.

National Universities offer a full range of undergraduate majors, plus master's and doctoral programs, and emphasize faculty research. National Liberal Arts Colleges focus almost exclusively on undergraduate education. They award at least 50 percent 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. Regional Colleges focus on undergraduate education but grant fewer than 50 percent of their degrees in liberal arts disciplines; this category also includes schools that have small bachelor's degree programs but primarily grant two-year associate degrees. 

Regional Universities and Regional Colleges are further divided and ranked in four geographical groups: North, South, Midwest and West. 

For the 2018 Best Colleges rankings, U.S. News followed the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education's Basic Classification system to determine schools' placement into these ranking categories.

In February 2016, Carnegie released official updates – called the "2015 Update" – including to the Basic system. U.S. News followed this 2015 Update for the 2017 Best Colleges rankings and again for the new 2018 edition. Consequently, only a handful of schools changed categories in the 2018 rankings.

The Carnegie classification, which higher education researchers use extensively, has been the basis of the Best Colleges ranking category system since the publication of the first rankings in 1983. The U.S. Department of Education and many higher education associations use the Carnegie system to organize or label their data. In some cases, the Carnegie classifications are used to determine colleges' eligibility for grant money. In short, the Carnegie categories are the accepted standard in U.S. higher education.

Data Sources 

Most colleges report the data directly to U.S. News. This year, 92 percent of the 1,388 ranked colleges and universities surveyed returned their statistical information during the spring and summer 2017 data collection window. 

For quality assurance, rankings data that schools reported to U.S. News were automatically compared against previous years' submissions and, in some cases, against third-party sources. Respondents were given the opportunity to review, revise and verify any flagged data.

In total, U.S. News has collected data on more than 1,800 colleges. While all the data appear on usnews.com, only 1,388 schools are included in the rankings described in this methodology and given a numerical rank. 

We obtained missing data from the Council for Aid to Education (alumni giving rates) and the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics (information on financial resources, faculty, SAT and ACT admissions test scores, acceptance rates and six-year graduation and first-year retention rates). 

U.S. News uses estimates, which are not displayed, in the ranking calculation when schools fail to report ranking indicator data points that are not available from other sources. Missing data are reported as N/A in the ranking tables on usnews.com. 

For colleges that were eligible to be ranked but refused to fill out the U.S. News statistical survey in spring and summer 2017, U.S. News has made extensive use of the statistical data those institutions were required to report to the National Center for Education Statistics, including such factors as SAT and ACT scores, acceptance rates, number of faculty, student-faculty ratios, and six-year graduation and first-year retention rates. These schools are footnoted as nonresponders.

Ranking Model Indicators 

The indicators used to capture academic quality fall into a number of categories: graduation and first-year student retention rates, assessment by administrators at peer institutions, faculty resources, admissions selectivity, financial resources, alumni giving, graduation rate performance and, for National Universities and National Liberal Arts Colleges only, high school counselor ratings of colleges. 

Collectively, 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 amount of weight assigned to each ranking indicator is unchanged from the previous edition. 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 2007 through fall 2010. First-year retention indicates the average proportion of first-year students who entered the school in fall 2012 through fall 2015 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 the 2016 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 2016 and spring 2017.

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 2015, spring 2016 and spring 2017 – 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 2017. Of the 4,608 academics who were sent questionnaires, 40.4 percent responded. This response rate is up very slightly from the 39 percent response rate in spring 2016 and the 40 percent response rate to the surveys conducted in spring 2015.

The counselors' one-year response rate was 7 percent for the spring 2017 surveys, down slightly from 9 percent in spring 2016. 

Schools that received less than a total of 10 ratings from high school counselors in this three-year period are not numerically ranked in this one factor but received an estimated high school counselor score for ranking purposes in the 2018 Best Colleges rankings. Their high school counselor score is listed as N/A.

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 2016-2017 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 the proportion of their fall 2016 undergraduate classes with fewer than 20 students. Classes with 20-29 students score second highest, 30-39 students third highest and 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 2015-2016 and 2016-2017 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 SAT critical reading and math portions and the composite ACT (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 2016 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 2016 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 2016. 

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 2016 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 last two editions of the rankings.

The SAT scores used in the 2018 edition of the Best Colleges rankings and published on usnews.com are for the fall 2016 entering class and are for the old SAT test, which students took prior to March 2016.

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 2015 and 2016 fiscal years. Spending on sports, dorms and hospitals does not 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 after controlling for spending and student characteristics, such as standardized test scores, high school class standing 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 2010 and the rate U.S. News had predicted for the class. New this year, the proportion of science, technology, engineering and math – STEM – degrees out of the total degrees granted are included for the National Universities ranking category only.

If the school's actual graduation rate for the 2010 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 rate that U.S. News predicted, 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 2014-2015 and 2015-2016, which is an indirect measure of student satisfaction.

Check out usnews.com over the coming year, since we may add content to the Best Colleges pages as we obtain additional information. And as you mine these tables for insights – where your SAT or ACT scores might win you some merit aid, for example, or where you will be apt to get the most attention from professors – keep in mind that they provide a launching pad, not an easy answer.

Searching for a college? Get our complete rankings of Best Colleges.