I’m not familiar with the criteria. Can you elucidate the main differences?
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U.S. News & World Report's 2026
Best Colleges edition used 17 key measures of academic quality for
National Universitiesand 13 for
National Liberal Arts Colleges,
Regional Universities and
Regional Colleges. Below is a focused explanation about the indicators and their weights. You can find a wider-ranging explanation about how U.S. News produced the rankings from research to reporting in the article,
How the College Rankings Were Calculated.
Ranking Indicator Weights
The table below shows the weights in percentages assigned to each indicator. Schools without eligible data to be assessed on their new entrants' ACT/SAT scores for two consecutive years had this indicator's 5% weight reallocated to average graduation rates, making their scores on this ranking factor equal 21% of the formula. Because fewer than 10 schools in both the Regional Universities North and Regional Colleges North rankings had eligible SAT/ACT data, all schools in those categories were ranked without SAT/ACT factored.
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Otherwise, the key difference between the weights for National Universities and those for all other rankings is that the National Universities methodology has four indicators pertaining to faculty research, which are aligned mission-wise with their Carnegie classification as doctoral universities (explained in the article,
Best Colleges Ranking Category Definitions). The other rankings apply this 4% weight across other faculty resource indicators.
Definitions of Ranking Criteria
Borrower debt: This assesses each school's typical average accumulated federal loan debt among only borrowers who graduated. It was sourced from the
College Scorecard, a portal of higher education data administered by the Education Department.
The College Scorecard summed each graduate's federal loans over their college education, excluding PLUS loans, Perkins loans and any loans disbursed post-separation. For example, if an undergraduate receives a federal loan for $2,000 for each of their eight semesters at one institution until graduating, their cumulative debt is recorded as $16,000 for that institution.
U.S. News averaged the median values from the two most recent College Scorecard releases. For the third consecutive year, this reflected pooled cohort data from fiscal years 2019-2020 and 2020-2021. Averages for each school were calculated among all years for which data was available, which in some cases was only one year. The small minority of schools without data for at least one release, either because of low borrower cohorts or not accepting federal loans (e.g., military academies) were assigned high performing values under the assumption that their students were well supported. Because the figure is specific to only borrowers who graduated, both nongraduates and graduates who covered their expenses without borrowing did not help or hurt schools' rankings.
U.S. News calculated a school's percentile distribution of its debt value within its ranking before normalizing. In other words, all schools received a score between 0 and 100. This was done to minimize the effect of outlier values in the rankings on a statistic that has a lot of compression. Otherwise, a difference of only a couple thousand dollars in debt among the best and worst performing schools on this factor had a disproportionate impact on the rankings.
This indicator does not control for the proportion of graduates who borrowed. This is because while there are exceptions, in general whether a student needed to borrow to attend school is more often predicated on their household income than on the school's affordability. However, schools that have few or no federal loan borrowers, and did not have non-suppressed data in the College Scorecard dataset, were assigned a normalized value equaling the highest score among institutions in their ranking category with eligible data.
The data was once again from fiscal years 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 because institutional debt data on more recent graduates had not been updated by College Scorecard at the time the rankings were finalized. A representative from College Scorecard has told U.S. News they intend to update this data at a future date in advance of the next rankings calculations.
College grads earning more than a high school grad: This assesses the proportion of a school's federal loan recipients who in 2020-2021 – five years since completing their undergraduate degrees – were earning more than the median salary of a 25-to-34-year-old whose highest level of education is high school.
The College Scorecard produced this statistic by incorporating earnings data from the U.S. Department of the Treasury. Earnings are defined as the sum of wages and deferred compensation from all W-2 forms received for each individual, plus self-employment earnings from Schedule SE. The College Scorecard documented that the
median wage of workers ages 25-34 that self-identify as high school graduates was $32,000 in 2021. The vast majority of jobs utilizing a college degree, even including those not chosen for being in high-paying fields, exceed this threshold.
The data only pertained to college and high school graduates employed in the workforce, meaning nongraduates, or graduates who four years later were continuing their education or simply not in the workforce, did not help or hurt any school.
U.S. News assigned a perfect score for the small minority of schools where at least 95% of graduates achieved the earnings threshold. Remaining schools were assessed on how close they came to 95%. The cap was chosen to allow for a small proportion of graduates to elect low-paying jobs without negatively impacting a school's ranking.
The ranking factor's 5% weight in the overall ranking formula equals the weight for borrower debt because both earnings and debt are meaningful post-graduate outcomes.
This data once again reflected years 2020-2021 because institutional earnings premiums data had not been updated by College Scorecard at the time the rankings were finalized. A representative from College Scorecard has told U.S. News they intend to update these data at a future date in advance of the next rankings calculations, and the reporting of earning premiums data by the U.S. government is part of
recent legislative changes.
Schools that have few or no federal loan borrowers, and did not have non-suppressed data in the College Scorecard dataset, were assigned a normalized value equaling the normalized value calculated for the graduation rates ranking factor, because graduation too is an outcome measure.
Faculty research (National Universities only): To be grouped in the National Universities ranking, an institution must be categorized in the
Carnegie classification as awarding doctorate-level degrees and conducting at least "moderate research." In alignment with these schools' missions, U.S. News again included four faculty research ranking factors based on bibliometric data in partnership with Elsevier. Although research is much less integral to undergraduate than graduate education – which is why these factors only contribute 4% in total to the ranking formula – undergraduates at universities can sometimes take advantage of departmental research opportunities, especially in upper-division classes. Even students not directly involved in research may still benefit by being taught by highly distinguished instructors. Also, the use of bibliometric data to measure faculty performance is well established in the field of academic research as a way to compare schools. “
