Quality Schools

In the United States, schools such as Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and Stanford have become synonymous with quality, excellence and prestige in higher education. In fact, these universities are so popular, that they are practically household names, despite the fact that only a small percentage of exclusive students attended these schools. These quality schools of higher education are also commonly found in mainstream media, further advancing its popularity, on the national and international scale. But why exactly are these universities considered at the top of the rankings of higher education? Well, let's find out.

Just how can rankings help you identify colleges and universities that are ideal for you? Certainly, the college experience consists of scores of intangibles that cannot be reduced to simple numbers. But for families, the U.S. News rankings provide an excellent starting base because they offer the opportunity to review the relative quality of institutions based on widely accepted universal indicators of excellence. You can compare different schools' numbers at a glance, and looking at unfamiliar schools that are ranked near schools you know can be a good way to broaden your school search.

Of course, many factors other than those are measured will figure in your decision, including the feel of campus life, activities, sports, academic offerings, location, tuition, and availability of financial aid. But if you combine the information in the rankings and reviews along with college visits, interviews, and your own gut feeling, U.S. News rankings can be a powerful tool in your search for a good college, and more importantly the one that suites your specific style and needs.

For the seventh consecutive year, U.S. News helps by spotlighting schools with outstanding examples of eight types of academic programs that have been proven to improve learning, including first-year experiences, learning communities, writing in the disciplines, senior capstone, study abroad, internships or cooperative education, opportunities for undergraduate research, and service learning.

The U.S. News rankings system of schools is based on two pillars. It relies on quantitative measures that education experts have proposed as reliable indicators of academic quality, and it's based on unbiased views of what really matters in education. How does the methodology of the rankings work? First, schools are categorized by mission, derived from the basic Carnegie classification, and, in some instances, by region.

The national universities offer a full range of undergraduate majors, plus master's and Ph.D. programs, and emphasize faculty research. The liberal arts colleges focus almost exclusively on undergraduate education. They award at least 50 percent of their degrees in the arts and sciences. The universities-master's offer a broad scope of undergraduate degrees and some master's degree programs but few, if any, doctoral programs. The baccalaureate colleges focus primarily on undergraduate education but grant fewer than 50 percent of their degrees in liberal arts disciplines. The baccalaureate colleges include institutions where more than 10 percent of the undergraduate degrees awarded are bachelor's degrees. The universities-master's and baccalaureate colleges categories are further divided by location, North, South, Midwest, and West.

Next, U.S. News gathers data from each college for up to 15 indicators of academic excellence. Each factor is given a weight that reflects U.S. News judgment about how much a measure actually matters. Finally, the colleges in each category are ranked against their competitors, based on their composite weighted score.

Schools are unranked and listed separately for America's Best Colleges 2009 if they have indicated that they don't use the SAT or ACT in admission decisions for first-time, first-year, degree-seeking applicants (or, in a few cases, if they didn't receive enough responses on the peer assessment survey to allow us to use their peer score as part of the overall ranking). Other schools were unranked for the following reasons: a total enrollment of fewer than 200 students; a vast proportion of nontraditional students; no first-year students (these are sometimes called upper-division schools). U.S. news did not rank private, for-profit universities; nor were a few specialized schools in arts, business, or engineering.

Most of the data gathered come from the colleges—and U.S. News takes goes a long way to ensure their accuracy. This year, 91.4 percent of the 1,476 colleges and universities U.S. News surveyed returned their statistical information. U.S. News obtained missing data from sources such as the American Association of University Professors, the National Collegiate Athletic Association, the Council for Aid to Education, and the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics. Data that did not come from this year's survey are footnoted. Estimates, which are never published by U.S. News, may be used when schools fail to report particular data points. Missing data are reported as N/A in the ranking tables.

The indicators for ranking schools used to capture academic quality fall into seven categories: assessment by administrators at peer institutions, retention of students, faculty resources, student selectivity, financial resources, alumni giving, and (for national universities and liberal arts colleges) "graduation rate performance," the difference between the proportion of students expected to graduate and the proportion who actually do. 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 does its job of educating students.

So let's take a brief review of some of the best ranked schools in the United States. For 2009, the best public universities are University of California--Berkeley, University of Virginia, University of California--Los Angeles, University of Michigan--Ann Arbor, and University of North Carolina--Chapel Hill. The list goes on up to number 67, Louisiana State University--Baton Rouge. Among other categories, the colleges with the best diversity in 2009 are University of La Verne, Jackson State University, South Carolina State University. In these colleges of great diversity, a large portion of the students receive pell grants, often given to undergrads with from low income families. Additionally, U.S. News has lists of other rankings for categories such as highest acceptance rates, most students in a sorority, and much more. These useful statistics are definitely worthy of exploring when choosing a college.