Top Colleges – Methodology

In order to identify top colleges, we calculated an academic rating for each school on our list. In particular, we rely on ten different indicators of academic quality, namely the average SAT/ACT composite of incoming students, the percentage of incoming students ranked in the top 10 percent of their high school class, student-to-faculty ratio, class size, the percentage of faculty who are full-time employees, the percentage of faculty with terminal degrees, mean faculty salary, freshman retention rate, six year-graduation rate, and graduation performance. This last variable compares an institution’s actual graduation rate with its predicted graduation rate, after controlling for the high school class rank and SAT/ACT scores of incoming students as well as the percentage of undergraduates receiving a Pell Grant, a grant primarily given to low-income students.