To rank colleges, U.S. News first places each school into categories based on mission (research university or liberal arts college) and, for universities offering a range of master’s programs and colleges focusing on undergraduate education without a particular emphasis on the liberal arts, by location (North, South, Midwest, and West). Universities where there is a focus on research and that offer several doctoral programs are ranked separately from liberal arts colleges, and master’s universities and comprehensive colleges are compared against other schools in the same group and region. Second, they gather data from and about each school in 15 areas related to academic excellence. Each indicator is assigned a weight (expressed as a percentage) based on their judgments about which measures of quality matter most. Third, the colleges are ranked based on their composite weighted score. U.S. News publish the numeric rank of roughly the top half of schools in each of the 10 categories; the remainder are placed into the third and fourth tiers, listed alphabetically, based on their overall score in their category.
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