Paco - surprised you would feel this way. US News measures universities they way a drunken man measures the value of a women - usually the size of her breasts and the likelihood he can get to bed that night.
Anyway:
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/admi...-apologies
and
https://www.usnews.com/education/best-co...e-rankings
The Ranking Factors
Below is an outline of the ranking factors. For a deeper dive into how the ranking factors were calculated, including the new ones, see the article, "A More Detailed Look at the Ranking Factors." Also see the Morse Code: Inside the College Rankings blog for insights behind these changes.
Outcomes
More than half of a school's rank is now comprised of varying outcome measures related to schools' success at enrolling, retaining and graduating students from different backgrounds with manageable debt and post-graduate success.
Graduation rates (16%, down from 17.6%) is a four-year rolling average of the proportion of each entering class (fall 2013-fall 2016) earning a bachelor's degree in six years or less.
First-year retention rates (5%, up from 4.4%) is a four-year rolling average of the proportions of first-year entering students (fall 2018-fall 2021) who returned the following fall.
Graduation rate performance (10%, up from 8%) is a four-year rolling average comparing each college's six-year graduation rates with what we predicted for their fall 2013 through fall 2016 entering classes, based on each school's characteristics. The more a school's actual graduation rate exceeded its predicted graduation rate, the more it exceeded expectations – and scored higher on this indicator. The predicted rates were modeled from students' socioeconomic backgrounds – namely those awarded Pell Grants (low-income household) and who were first in their families to attend college (first generation), as well as admissions data, school financial resources, and National Universities' math and science orientations.
Social mobility,
(Really social mobility?)which is part of U.S. News' outcomes measures, assessed how well schools graduated economically disadvantaged students. The ranking factors – which feed standalone Top Performers On Social Mobility rankings – were computed by aggregating two to four ranking factors assessing graduation rates of Pell-awarded students and, for the National Universities rankings only, first generation students. First generation graduation rates of federal loan recipients are sourced by the U.S. Department of Education's College Scorecard and were only incorporated in the National Universities rankings because schools' smaller student cohorts among baccalaureate and regional schools resulted in some of their data being suppressed in the dataset.
• Pell graduation rates (3% in National Universities and 5.5% in other rankings; all up from 2.5%) is a four-year rolling average that incorporates six-year bachelor's degree-seeking graduation rates of Pell Grant students from the fall 2013 through fall 2016 entering classes, adjusted to give much more credit to schools with larger Pell student proportions.
• Pell graduation performance (3% in National Universities and 5.5% in other rankings; all up from 2.5%) compares each school's six-year bachelor's degree-seeking graduation rate among Pell recipients with its six-year graduation rates among non-Pell recipients, then adjusts to give significantly more credit to schools who enrolled larger Pell student proportions. The higher a school's Pell graduation rate relative to its non-Pell graduation rate up to the rates being equal, the better it scores. This, too, is computed as a four-year rolling average from the fall 2013-fall 2016 entering classes.
• First generation graduation rates (2.5% in National Universities, new) is the same calculation as Pell graduation rates, but based on graduation rates of federal loan recipients who were first in their families to attend college, entering fall 2011 through fall 2013.
• First generation graduation performance (2.5% in National Universities, new) is the same calculation as Pell graduation performance, but based on graduation rates of first generation federal loan recipients entering fall 2011 through fall 2013. For more information on first generation graduation, see the article, "A More Detailed Look at the Ranking Factors."
Borrower debt (5%; up from 3%)
(So the wealthier school with the smaller number of students is fundamentally better because they have an endowment so high that tuition is charged only the the wealth) assesses each school's typical average accumulated federal loan debt among borrowers only. Graduates who covered their expenses without borrowing did not help or hurt schools. New this edition, the data was sourced from College Scorecard instead of the U.S. News survey for all schools, and was of median debt instead of mean debt. The calculation averaged 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 data.
College grads earning more than a high school graduate (5%, new) assessed the proportion of a school's federal loan recipients who in 2019-2020 – four years since completing their undergraduate degrees – were earning more than a typical high school graduate salary, as determined by and reported in the College Scorecard. The website documented that the median wage of workers ages 25-34 that self-identify as high school graduates was $32,000 in 2021 dollars. This means the vast majority of jobs utilizing a college degree, even including those not chosen for being in high-paying fields, exceed this threshold. Schools were assigned a perfect score if at least 90% of graduates achieved this threshold, and the remaining schools were assessed by how close they were to 90%. The data only pertained to employed college graduates; meaning nongraduates, or graduates who four years later were in graduate school, working part-time or simply not in the workforce did not help or hurt any school. For more information, see the article, "A More Detailed Look at the Ranking Factors."
Peer Assessment (20%, unchanged)
(At least the peers have expanded beyond the one of two high school advisors US news used to use to generate a peer assessment. Do they still rank 1, 2, 3, 4 by state so that the 3rd and 4th school might be far superior to the 3 and 4th school in the next two states?)
Academic reputation matters because it factors things that cannot easily be captured elsewhere. For example, an institution known for having innovative approaches to teaching may perform especially well on this indicator, whereas a school struggling to keep its accreditation will likely perform poorly.
Each year, top academics – presidents, provosts and deans of admissions – rate the academic quality of peer institutions with which they are familiar on a scale of 1 (marginal) to 5 (distinguished). We take a two-year weighted average of the ratings. Those who don't know enough about a school to evaluate it fairly are asked to mark "don't know."
(No bias here, eh)
U.S. News collected the most recent data by administering peer assessment surveys to schools in spring and summer 2023. Of the 4,734 academics who were sent questionnaires on the overall rankings in 2023, 30.8% responded compared with 34.1% in 2022. The peer assessment response rate for the National Universities category was 44% and the National Liberal Arts category was 28.6%.
Whether a school submitted a peer assessment survey or statistical survey had no impact on the average peer score it received from other schools. However, this year nonresponders to the statistical survey who submitted peer surveys had their ratings of other schools excluded from the computations.
Schools interested in a breakdown of their peer assessment ratings by respondent type and region can access this information, along with 29 million other data points, with a subscription to U.S. News' Academic Insights. This web-based platform facilitates a deep dive for studying and benchmarking the rankings and is designed for colleges and universities only.
Faculty Resources
Research shows the greater access students have to quality instructors, the more engaged they will be in class and the more they will learn and be satisfied with their instructors. U.S. News uses three factors from the 2022-2023 academic year to assess a school's commitment to instruction. Their weights are each lower for National Universities than other rankings to make room for the new faculty research ranking factors.
• Faculty salaries (6% in National Universities, 8% in other rankings; all changed from 7%) assesses the average salaries, excluding benefits, for full-time instructional professors, associate professors and assistant professors using definitions from the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). Salary data was adjusted for regional differences in the cost of living using the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis regional price parities indexes, published in December 2022. A change this year was salaries of full-time instructional faculty categorized as either instructors, having no rank or lecturers were added to the mix of faculty for a more comprehensive measure of the staff teaching students than if only professors' salaries were considered.
• Student-faculty ratio (3% in National Universities, 4% in other rankings; all changed from 1%) is the ratio of undergraduate students to instructional faculty. (Is this by course or the entire school, does it include online kids?)
• Full-time faculty (2% in National Universities, 3% in all other rankings; all changed from 1%) compares the counts of full-time faculty to part-time faculty who are teaching courses, with a higher proportion of faculty teaching full-time receiving credit.
Financial resources (8%, down from 10%): Generous per-student academic spending indicates a college can offer a variety of programs and services. (Really, then who paid for the Dean and the Provosts new office?) U.S. News measures financial resources by using the average spending per student on instruction, research, student services and related educational expenditures in the 2021 fiscal year. Expenditures were compared with fall 2020 full-time and part-time undergraduate and graduate enrollment. New for this edition for all schools, U.S. News only used FY2021 financial resources data sourced directly from the U.S. Department of Education to ensure more standardized reporting among schools. Previously this indicator had used a two-year average.
Standardized tests (5%, unchanged): U.S. News factors median test scores for all enrollees who submitted scores used in the admission process for the mathematics and evidence-based reading and writing portions of the SAT and the composite ACT. Both SATs and ACTs were converted to their 0-100 test-taker percentile distributions and weighted based on the proportions of new entrants submitting each exam. For example, if a school had two-thirds of its test-takers submitting ACT scores and one-third submitting SAT scores, its ACT scores would weigh twice as heavily as its SAT scores toward this ranking factor. (If you offer a free application to smart kids you get more applications with higher board scores)
For the second year, the following two-year approach to the methodology was in effect:
• By default, we assessed schools on their fall 2022 SAT/ACT scores if they were reported on at least half their new entrants.
• For schools not meeting the first condition, we assessed them on their fall 2021 SAT/ACT scores (scaled to fall 2021 percentile distributions) only if they were reported on at least half their fall 2021 new entrants.
• For schools reporting SAT/ACT on less than 50% of both their fall 2022 and fall 2021 entering classes – including test-blind schools – we did not assess them on standardized tests at all. Instead, for those schools we increased the weights of graduation rates an additional five percentage points, from 16% to 21%. This substitute was chosen because it was the statistic from the rankings formula that correlated closest to standardized tests.
Given the growth of test-optional admissions, we discontinued our prior practice of discounting schools that categorically excluded varying groups of students in reporting.
Faculty research (National Universities only): To be grouped in the National Universities ranking, an institution must be classified in the Carnegie Classifications as awarding doctorate-level degrees and conducting at least "moderate research." In alignment with these schools' missions, U.S. News introduced four new faculty research ranking factors based on bibliometric data, such as publications and citations, in partnership with Elsevier. They each reflect a five-year window from 2018-2022 as well as the strength and impact of the faculty instead of the scale of the university.
• Citations per publication (1.25%) is total citations divided by total publications. This is the average number of citations a university's publications receive. The metrics are extracted from SciVal based on Elsevier’s Scopus
Data.
• Field weighted citation impact (1.25%) is citation impact per paper, normalized for each field. The metrics are extracted from SciVal based on Elsevier’s Scopus
Data.
(Let's not tell people about Elsiver attempting to corner the market and make journal publication cost prohibitate so that only the richer schools who subsidize this class of researher publish in the Elsiver world)
• The share of publications cited in the top 5% of the most cited journals (1%). The metrics are extracted from SciVal based on Elsevier’s Scopus
Data.
• The share of publications cited in the top 25% of the most cited journals (0.5%). The metrics are extracted from SciVal based on Elsevier’s Scopus
Data.
Universities with fewer than 5,000 total publications over five years were discounted on a sliding scale to reduce outliers based on small cohort sizes, and to require a minimum quantity of research to score well on the factor. Each indicator is calculated at the school level.
Elsevier, a global leader in information and analytics, helps researchers and health care professionals advance science and improve health outcomes for the benefit of society. (Holy ****, spoken like Lucifer himself wrote the text). It does this by facilitating insights and critical decision-making for customers across the global research and health ecosystems. To learn more, visit its website.
For more information on the above, see the article, "A More Detailed Look at the Ranking Factors."
Eliminated Rankings Factors
Five ranking factors totaling 18% of the previous edition's rankings were removed from the formula completely. These factors and their corresponding weights last year were class size (8%), the proportion of a school's faculty with terminal degrees (3%), alumni giving rate (3%), the proportion of graduates borrowing (2%) and high school class standing (2%). Although each of these statistics adhered to industry standard definitions from the Common Data Set and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE), they were not collected or computed by the U.S. Department of Education and therefore not as universally reported by schools. Some of these statistics had growing logistical issues that made them more challenging than in previous years to continue incorporating into the rankings. Learn more about these changes in the Morse Code.
Data Sources
Several ranking factors above used data schools reported directly in U.S. News' surveys, enabling U.S. News to incorporate statistics not yet available from external sources.
New this year, U.S. News elected to only use ranking factors in which a related third-party sourced value was typically obtainable when schools failed to provide adequate data for a given ranking factor or declined to submit our survey altogether. For missing U.S. News statistical survey data, one-year or older data from the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics was substituted, using its Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) data center tool.
Data pertaining to fall 2021 cohorts and FY2021 data from IPEDS uses its provisional data release. According to the IPEDS methodology, the data undergoes an initial review and validation process, including following up with institutions. However, the provisional data has not been extensively reviewed or edited. In contrast, earlier data U.S. News applies to the rankings – such as those used in multi-year averages – are from the IPEDS final data, from which institutions may revise their data should an error be detected by the institution.
Data for the rankings not collected in U.S. News' surveys or downloaded from IPEDS were either supplied directly to U.S. News by Elsevier or downloaded from College Scorecard. This online tool run by the U.S. Department of Education houses a repository of publicly downloadable federal data on higher education institutions, including statistics on the outcomes of federal student loan recipients from the National Student Loan Data System.
For every ranking factor that averaged statistics across multiple years' reporting, U.S. News only incorporated data available. For example, if only three years of graduation rate data for a school were available, U.S. News calculated its average graduation rate based on three years instead of the default amount of four years.
In infrequent cases when data for a ranking factor was not available to U.S. News at all, U.S. News imputed values depending upon circumstance.
U.S. News' Data Collection
This year, 79.9% (a slight decline compared to 83.5% last year) of the nearly 1,500 ranked institutions in the overall ranking returned their statistical information in the spring and summer of 2023. In total, U.S. News has collected data on more than 1,800 institutions. While data for all schools appears on usnews.com, nearly 1,500 schools were ranked.
I could go on, but Universities know that only rubes and dumb media use or pay attention US News. It's not how real universities compare each other to themselves.
You may ask, how do I know these things. I know because while my doctorates are old, the ones I am paying for now with one starting out and another ABD, sadly keep me informed as they dig into my wallet for money to pay for crap that their stipends and comped tuition will not pay for.
Competing well in US News is something for the non ACC, non Big 10, non Ivy, non P12 and non super rich school such as Texas, TAMU, ND, etc.
It's something for JMU, ECU, App, Mercer, Temple, Marshall, ETSU, Middle Tennessee, George Mason, Lehigh, the MAC schools, and half the SEC to fight over. It's something designed and targeted toward the middle class of the college market. Not the middle class, but the middle class of the college market.
You have about 75 -100 schools in the US that are designed for and cater to elites.
Using US News metrics to evaluate that group is worthless.
