by our College Data Analytics TeamWe have analyzed over 4,500 colleges & universities in the United States to come up with this year’s ranking. This new edition of our Best “Bottoms Up” Colleges Rankings greatly expands the outcome factors we use in determining our rankings breakdowns both by major and school-wide.
Schools are assessed on a “bottoms up” basis in over 500 different majors & program areas, and 60+ different places (state, region & nationwide), and multiple degree levels to come up with what amounts to approximately 100k distinct lists to help students find the best-fit college for them. Any “overall” ranking cannot come close to helping an individual student or parent make a decision that will impact them for a good portion of their adult life.
The goal of the College Factual Best Colleges rankings is help students find the best fit college for them. Our undergraduate rankings consider over 100 different distinct factors that are grouped into 7 scoring categories. Please see our complete Best Colleges Methodology for more details.
This year represents a significant step forward in college rankings.
This year’s ranking expands our coverage of the following factors from a single year’s worth of data to upwards of 10 or more.
Our repayment scoring has also been expanded to consider not just student loan default rates but delinquency rates, the percentage of students that are making no progress paying off their loans, those that are and those that have fully paid them off. We have also included the percentage of student loan principal that students have been able to pay off. This factor exposes the fact that rather than making progress paying down loans, some school’s students debt balances well exceed the initial amount borrowed.
All of this expansion has been done for our college-wide analysis, but more importantly, has also been done for at each specific major, looking only at employment rates, median earnings and repayment rates for graduates in those majors at each school. This and the fact that we do it for 500 different majors is unique among college rankings.
Our way of assessing a school and the programs it offers remains at the core of what we do. We believe a school is a collection of the programs it offers and should be ranked from the program up. Since 2012 the foundation of our approach is to begin at the individual programs and majors offered by institutions. We calculate a score for each individual major and compare it against the same majors (and degree level) at other schools. In this way we are more fairly comparing “apples to apples”.
With these major-specific scores in hand we then combine them all, weighted by the number of completions at the school for each major, to come up with an overall ranking for the school. While certain school-wide factors are included, the majority of the weighting comes from these aggregated program level assessments.
The search bar on the site is the best way to find your school’s profile overview page.
The introduction on that page typically shows the number of awards that have been granted and links directly to the Rankings Overview (example) for your school. The first section below the introduction on the overview page focuses on rankings and has several links to see all of the rankings.
Any ranking mentioned on this page means that the school has scored in the top 15% of all schools in that category and is eligible to display the corresponding badge certifying that they have earned this recognition. There is more information at the bottom of that page on how to contact us to receive more information about how to do so.
Comparing colleges as a whole can be misleading. How do you compare an undergraduate school that focuses on associates level nursing to one that focuses on bachelors level engineering or business? Most school-wide rankings tend to focus on a single type of school and only feature those schools in their list, leaving out all the other equally valid types of schools and the students interested in them.
In the same way that a “Best Athletes in the World” ranking might include athletes from different sports, our overall Best Colleges ranking includes undergraduate schools of many types. For this reason, you might see a school on the broad overall list that excels in serving traditional students (recent high-school grads) next to a school that excels in serving a different, but equally valid audience.
Keep that in mind as you peruse the high-level lists and know that if you want a more specific answer, you need to ask a more specific question by drilling down into the particular program area or degree level you want to focus on.
Asking a broad question like “What is the best college?” is a the wrong question. The better question for a student to ask is “What is the best college for YOU?” based on YOUR interests. That is the ONLY question we focus on. Our institution wide rankings are built on this core foundation and can be quite different from all other “overall” rankings. Dig deeper into our intensely data-driven rankings and insights to learn why we have built it this way for you.
Please see one of our following guides for additional tips on getting the most from this year’s rankings:
College Factual’s mission is to help all students find their best-fit college, career, and major and the most affordable path to get there. Located in the Capital Region of New York, we offer free resources to students domestically and internationally to help them find their future faster.
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