To establish the set of colleges included in the rankings, we started with the 1,559 colleges in the 50 states and Washington, D.C., that are listed in the U.S. Department of Education’s Integrated Post-secondary Education Data System (IPEDS) and have a 2021 Carnegie basic classification of doctoral, master’s, and baccalaureate colleges, are not exclusively graduate colleges, participate in federal financial aid programs, were offering classes, and had not announced an impending closure for the 2025–26 academic year as of June 12, 2025. We then excluded 42 colleges with fewer than 100 undergraduate students in any year they were open between fall 2021 and fall 2023, six colleges with an average of 25 or fewer students in the federal graduation rate cohort in 2020 through 2022, and an additional 36 colleges with an average of 20 or fewer Pell recipients earning bachelor’s degrees during the same time period.
Next, we decided to exclude the five federal military academies (Air Force, Army, Coast Guard, Merchant Marine, and Navy) because their unique missions make them difficult to evaluate using our methodology. Our rankings are based in part on the percentage of students receiving Pell Grants and the percentage of students enrolled in the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC), whereas the service academies provide all students with free tuition (and thus no Pell Grants or student loans) and commission graduates as officers in the armed services (and thus not the ROTC program). We dropped an additional 42 colleges for not having data on at least one of our key social mobility outcomes (percent Pell, graduation rate, or net price). We omitted seven religiously affiliated colleges that granted a majority of their degrees in philosophy or theology, as their missions are more narrowly focused than typical colleges. This resulted in a final sample of 1,421 colleges and includes public, private nonprofit, and for-profit colleges.
The methodology behind our main rankings changed substantially this year. Instead of using three equally weighted metrics (social mobility, research, and service) for all colleges and universities, we created a separate research ranking for the 139 universities that averaged more than $100 million in research expenditures over the past three years. Our main rankings now have four equally weighted portions: access, affordability, outcomes, and community and national service. This means that top-ranked colleges needed to be excellent across the full breadth of our measures, rather than excelling in just one measure. In order to ensure that each measurement contributed equally to a college’s score within any given category, we standardized each data element so that each had a mean of zero and a standard deviation of one (unless noted). Missing earnings data (affecting less than 1 percent of all observations) were imputed and noted with “N/A” in the rankings tables. We adjusted data to account for statistical outliers by allowing no college’s performance in any single area to exceed five standard deviations from the mean of the data set. All measures (unless noted) use an average of the three most recent years of data in an effort to get a better picture of a college’s performance rather than statistical noise.
The access, affordability, and outcomes components of the ranking also double as our Best Bang for the Buck rankings, with the exception that the main rankings are both overall and by Carnegie classification while the Best Bang for the Buck rankings are by region.
The two access components are the number of Pell Grant recipients and Pell enrollment performance. To estimate Pell enrollment performance, we compared actual shares of Pell students to the predicted share after controlling for ACT/SAT scores and the share of families in a state with incomes below $35,000 and between $35,001 and $75,000 per year. The two affordability components are net price and median student loan debt of graduates. We measured a college’s affordability using data from IPEDS for the average net prices paid by first-time, full-time, in-state students with family incomes below $75,000 per year over the past three years. We focused on these income categories because of our interest in affordability for students from lower-to-middle-income families. Median student debt came from the College Scorecard and includes federal loans taken out by the student, excluding Parent PLUS and private loans. The College of the Ozarks meets financial need as a work college without issuing loans, so we assigned them zero debt.
We used four outcome measures in this year’s ranking. The first was a graduation rate performance measure that compared the reported eight-year graduation rate for all students (from IPEDS) to a predicted graduation rate based on the percentage of Pell recipients, the percentage of students receiving student loans, the admit rate, the racial/ethnic and gender makeup of the student body, the number of students (overall and full-time), and whether a college is primarily residential. We estimated this predicted graduation rate measure in a regression model using average data from the past three years, imputing for missing data when necessary. Colleges with graduation rates that are higher than the “average” college with similar stats score better than colleges that match or, worse, undershoot the mark. A few colleges had predicted graduation rates over 100 percent, which we then trimmed back to 100 percent.
We used IPEDS data comparing graduation rates of Pell and non-Pell students to develop a Pell graduation gap measure. Colleges that had higher Pell than non-Pell graduation rates received a positive score on this measure. We measured post-college outcomes using actual versus predicted earnings of students nine years after college entry (using just two cohorts of data). This captures the outcomes of graduates as well as dropouts. Finally, we used National Science Foundation data on the share of undergraduate alumni who have gone on to receive a PhD in any subject, relative to the size of the college. This was in the research category in previous rankings, but it fits better under student outcomes in our updated rankings.
We determined the service score by measuring each college’s performance across a range of measures. We compiled AmeriCorps and Peace Corps data into a combined metric. We used an indicator for whether a college currently provides at least some matching funds for undergraduate students who had received a Segal AmeriCorps Education Award for having completed national service (two points) and a standardized measure of the share of students receiving Segal awards. We divided the number of alumni currently serving in the Peace Corps by total enrollment, using alumni data following the program’s post-pandemic resumption.
We judged military service by collecting data on the size of each college’s Air Force, Army, and Navy ROTC programs and dividing by the number of students. We used the percentage of federal work-study grant money spent on community service projects as a measure of how much colleges prioritize community service; this is based on data provided by the Corporation for National and Community Service. Each of these three measures was standardized using a three-year rolling average.
We added a measure for whether a college received the Carnegie Community Engagement Classification, with listed colleges receiving two points. This classification rewards colleges that provide documentation of their institutional mission and broader public engagement. We used a measure of voting engagement using data from the National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement (NSLVE) at Tufts University and the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge. Colleges could earn up to four points for fulfilling each of four criteria. They could receive one point for making their NSLVE survey data publicly available through ALL IN in 2020. They could receive one point for creating an action plan through the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge in 2025 and an additional point for being a presidential signatory. A college earned one point for having a student voter registration rate above 85 percent in 2020. Finally, we created a measure of the percentage of all degrees awarded in health, education, and social work to reward colleges that produce leaders in socially valuable fields that are not always highly paid.
The research score for the 139 universities with at least $100 million in average expenditures is based on four measures: the total amount of an institution’s research spending (from IPEDS); the number of science and engineering PhDs awarded by the university (from the National Science Foundation); the number of faculty receiving prestigious awards, relative to the number of full-time faculty (from the Center for Measuring University Performance); and the number of faculty in the National Academies, relative to the number of full-time faculty (also from CMUP).
We compared our rankings to the U.S. Department of Education’s list of colleges subject to the most severe level of heightened cash monitoring, which indicates that a college is facing significant financial problems or has other serious issues that need to be addressed. Three colleges (Cheyney University in Pennsylvania, the NewSchool of Architecture and Design in California, and Saint Augustine’s University in North Carolina) were on that list as of December 2024. We kept these colleges in our rankings, but denoted them with ^^ to draw this concern to readers’ attention. —Eds.
