How We Do the Rankings
The second major change this year is that we have created groups of unranked schools that we have listed alphabetically in separate tables at the bottom of the category in which they would have been ranked. This is not the first year U.S. News has decided not to rank some schools; we have been doing this to some degree since 1990. U.S. News believes that because these schools are unable to report key educational characteristics or because they have certain other characteristics, it would be unfair to try to compare them statistically with the other schools that are part of the rankings.
Ranked or unranked? A new group of schools was added to the list of unranked schools for America's Best Colleges 2008: those institutions that have indicated that they don't use the SAT or ACT in admission decisions for first-time, first-year, degree-seeking applicants. In addition, some schools were not ranked because 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 types of schools have been unranked in previous years and continue to be unranked this year. They include schools with total enrollment of fewer than 200 students; schools where a vast proportion of students are nontraditional; colleges that don't accept first-year students, sometimes called upper-division schools; private universities that are for-profit; and a few specialized schools in arts, business, or engineering. (These schools are classified by Carnegie as "Special Focus Institutions.")
We added the proportion of the student body receiving Pell grants into our predicted graduation rate formula. Pell grants are an important indicator of how many low-income students attend a school, and adding them resulted in a model that better captures the school's student body and improves that indicator. More about Pell grants can be found in our Economic Diversity table.
Same schools, new name. Finally, we changed the name of the comprehensive colleges-bachelor's ranking category to baccalaureate colleges since we believe the new label is a clearer way to identify these schools in terms of their broad educational mission.
How does the methodology work? First, schools are categorized by mission and, in some cases, 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 on undergraduate education but grant fewer than 50 percent of their degrees in liberal arts disciplines. The baccalaureate colleges include institutions where at least 10 percent of the undergraduate degrees awarded are bachelor's degrees. The universities-master's and baccalaureate colleges categories are further subdivided by geography—North, South, Midwest, and West.
Next, we gather data from each college for up to 15 indicators of academic excellence. Each factor is assigned a weight that reflects our judgment about how much a measure matters. Finally, the colleges in each category are ranked against their peers, based on their composite weighted score.
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