Compiling the 2015 Forbes/CCAP Rankings

By the Staff of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity1

Ranking Factors and Weights
The Center for College Affordability and Productivity (CCAP), in conjunction with Forbes,
compiled its college rankings using five general categories, with several component factors
within each category. The weightings for each category and component are listed in parentheses:

3-Year Moving Average Components:

1. Overall 2015 Score

(50%)

2. Overall 2014 Score

(25%)

3. Overall 2013 Score

(25%)

2015 Ranking Factors and Weights:

1. Student Satisfaction
(25%)
Student Evaluations from RateMyProfessor.com
Actual Freshman-to-Sophomore Retention Rates
Predicted vs. Actual Freshman-to-Sophomore Retention Rates
Facebook School Satisfaction Survey
2. Post-Graduate Success
Salary of Alumni from Payscale.com
American Leaders List

(7.5%)
(12.5%)
(2.5%)
(2.5%)

(32.5%)
(10%)
(22.5%)

3. Student Debt
(25%)
Average Federal Student Loan Debt Load
(10%)
Student Loan Default Rates
(12.5%)
Predicted vs. Actual Average Federal Student Loan Debt Load
(2.5%)
4. Four-year Graduation Rate
Actual Four-year Graduation Rate
Predicted vs. Actual Four-year Graduation Rate

(7.5%)

5. Academic Success
Student Nationally Competitive Awards
Alumni Receiving PhDs

(10%)

(5%)
(2.5%)

(7.5%)
(2.5%)

School Selection
The 650 institutions of higher education included in this list award undergraduate degrees or
certificates requiring 4 or more years of study, according to the U.S. Department of Education
and are classified by The Carnegie Foundation as Doctorate-granting Universities, Masters
Colleges and Universities, or Baccalaureate Colleges.2 We have accounted for any changes in the
names of institutions that have occurred over the past year.

3-Year Moving Average Method

The 2015 Forbes/CCAP college ranking is the inaugural year for a 3-year moving average of the
schools overall scores. This means that the overall rank is computed from 3 scores: the scores
found in 2015, 2014, and 2013 using the factors and weights discussed (the weights for 2014 and
2013 can be found from the methodologies for those years at
http://centerforcollegeaffordability.org/rankings/). The same general approach to computing the
scores for 2015 are still employed and are discussed further below.
Ranking colleges on the basis of outcomes is inherently more variable year-over-year than inputbased rankings such as those compiled by U.S. News & World Report. To help control for
unwanted variability, however, we use a this average of the overall scores. The 2015 score
receives the highest weight at 50 percent, and the 2014 and 2013 score each receive 25 percent of
the overall weight in the final rankings.

Student Evaluations from Ratemyprofessors.com (7.5%)

RateMyProfessors.com, founded in 1999 as TeacherRatings.com, is a free online service that
allows college students from American, Canadian, British, New Zealand, and Australian
Institutions to assign ratings to professors anonymously. The participation of students has been
quite significant: over 13 million evaluations in total have been posted to this site. University
administrations have no control over the process of evaluation, meaning schools would find it
difficult to try to game the process by manipulating student participation. Furthermore, this
database is useful because it provides a uniform evaluation method for all instructors at all
schools in the country.
Any student (for that matter, any registered user) can enter an evaluation of a professor on
RateMyProfessors.com. All categories are based on a 5 point rating system, with 5 as the highest
rating. The categories students can evaluate professors on are Easiness, Helpfulness, and Clarity.
Overall Quality is determined by averaging the Helpfulness and Clarity ratings given by
students. There is also a chili pepper (hotness) component that assesses the professors
physical appearance, which we ignored in the determination of this component of the rankings.
Why This Measure?

In one sense, students are consumers of the education colleges and universities offer, with the
core dimension of the learning experience coming from classes taught by instructors. Asking
students what they think about their courses is akin to what some agencies like Consumers
Report or J.D. Powers and Associates do when they provide information on various goods or
services. As Otto, Sanford and Ross note, students who post ratings on the website can be
viewed as experts due to their significant experience with the professor(s) they are evaluating.3
Considering the popularity of RateMyProfessors.com (RMP), with students themselves using the
ratings to develop expectations about faculty members and set their schedules, we agree with
these scholars when they argue that online ratings should be taken seriously, albeit in a defined
and limited manner.
To be sure, the use of this instrument is not without criticism. Some would argue that only an
unrepresentative sample of students complete the forms. In some cases, the results for a given
instructor might be biased because only students who are extremely unhappy (or, conversely,
extremely happy) with a course or instructor complete the evaluation, while in other instances
perhaps an instructor urges students liking the course to complete the evaluation, biasing results
in the opposite direction.4
It is possible that the concern regarding biases has some validity as it applies to individual
instructors. But when the evaluations of dozens or even hundreds of instructors are added
together, most examples of bias are washed outor any systematic bias that remains is likely
relatively similar from campus to campus. What is important, for our purposes, is the average
course evaluation for a large number of classes and instructors, and the aggregation of data
should largely eliminate major inter-school biases in the data. In fact, on an institutional level,
there is some evidence that higher RMP scores are correlated with fewer evaluations; that is, the
lower the number of RMP evaluations per enrollment, the greater the schools composite RMP
score.
The other main objection to the RMP measure is that instructors can buy high rankings by
making their course easy and giving high grades. Again, to some extent the huge variations in
individual instructor rigor and easiness are reduced when the evaluations of all instructors are
aggregated nearly every school has some easy and some difficult professors. Nonetheless, we
take this criticism seriously and controlled for the effect that easiness has on evaluations of
instructor or course quality. Perhaps the simplest method for controlling for the bias that easiness
(or, in this case, perceived easiness) plays in instructor evaluations is to adjust the RMP Overall
Quality ratings by the Easiness ratings students report. Furthermore, there are additional
theoretical reasons (besides simply controlling for bias) to take course difficulty into account.
For example, arguably courses which students perceive to be the most difficult and challenging
are precisely those courses in which more students learning gains are the greatest, regardless of
the quality students otherwise perceive. For these reasons, we gave special consideration to the
difficulty factor in the measurement of this factor, as discussed below.
Scholarly Assessments of RateMyProfessors.com
There have been a number of studies assessing the validity and/or reliability of the RMP ratings
data. The general approach is to relate the results on this website to the more established student
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evaluations of teaching (SET) that are routinely performed by most institutions of higher
education. Many colleges think their own SET data provide useful information in assessing the
effectiveness of faculty and instruction (after all, these evaluations are a consideration for
promotion and teaching at many educational institutions).5,6 Therefore, if these institutional
evaluations are mirrored by the RMP results, it enhances the likelihood that RMP data are a valid
measure vis--vis official SET data.
The research to date cautiously supports the view that RMP is relatively similar to the SET used
by universities themselves. One study states, The results of this study offer preliminary support
for the validity of the evaluations on RateMyProfessors.com.7 Coladarci and Kornfield,
surveying instructors at the University of Maine, note that ...these RMP/SET correlations should
give pause to those who are inclined to dismiss RMP indices as meaningless, although they also
expressed some concerns that the correlation between the two types of instruments were far from
1.00.8 Otto, Sanford and Ross conclude that their analysis of ratings on RMP reveals what would
be expected if the online ratings of professors were in fact valid measures of student learning.9
More recently, Bleske-Rechek and Michels, in an analysis of students across majors at a single
state university, contradict the popular notion that students who use RMP only post highly
negative or highly positive ratings.10 Bleske-Rechek and Michels also conclude that the evidence
does not support the common assumption that students who post on RMP are not typical of the
whole student body.
To be sure, the research is not all enthusiastically supportive of RMP. Felton, Koper, Mitchell,
and Stinson suggest that the positive correlation between RMP quality ratings and ease of course
assessments make this a questionable instrument.11 Bleske-Rechek and Michels confirm the
existence of a positive relationship between student evaluations of quality and easiness at the
instructor level, Bleske-Rechek and Michels warn that it is misguided to jump to the conclusion
that the association between easiness and quality is necessarily a product of just bias and
suggest that the RMP data may only be reflecting that quality instruction facilitates learning.12
However, regardless of the precise causes of positive relationship between student assessments
of quality and easiness, we have adjusted the RMP score for course easiness to correct for this
potential bias.
In spite of some drawbacks of student evaluations of teaching, they apparently have value for the
86% of schools that, historically, have some sort of internal evaluation system. RMP ratings give
similar results to these systems. Moreover, they are a measure of consumer preferences, which is
what is critically important in rational consumer choice. When combined with the significant
advantages of being uniform across different schools, not being subject to easy manipulation by
schools, and being publicly available, RMP is a preferred data source for information on student
evaluations of teachingit is the largest known single uniform data set for student perceptions of
the quality of their instruction.
Calculating the Schools Scores
We took the average overall quality rating for all instructors at each school based on the quality
ratings of individual professors listed on the RMP website, reported on a scale of 1 to 5. We also
derived an estimate for student perception of course rigor from the reported RMP easiness
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variable. The RMP easiness variable, like the overall quality variable, is based on a scale from 1
to 5, with 5 being the easiest. To establish a measure of course rigor, we invert the scale of the
rating by subtracting the easiness score from 6 to yield a course rigor variable, also on a scale
also of 1 to 5.
We computed the overall RMP score by summing the quality weighting with the derived rigor
rating, such that the weighting for the quality rating was three times higher than the weighting
for the derived rigor rating. This composite score was then adjusted using Bayesian methods that
consider the number of votes submitted.13 This composite score accounts for 7.5 percent of the
final score for each school in the Forbes ranking.

Freshman-to-Sophomore Retention Rates (15%)

Data on freshman-to-sophomore retention rates are quite common, and are often used in college
rankings, guides and databases. For our purposes, we use retention rates as an indicator of
student satisfaction with the education offered by the college or university which they attend. We
interpret higher retention rates as suggestive of higher student satisfaction while lower retention
rates indicate (other things being equal) a lower level of student satisfaction. Like any other
metric used in assessing colleges and universities, retention rates are limited in the amount of
reliable information they can convey. However, because retention rates are readily available and
are, to an extent, a measure of colleges performance, they can provide some indication of
college students satisfaction.
Freshman-to-sophomore retention rates are part of the dataset annually collected by the U.S.
Department of Education from any college or university which reports to the U.S. Department of
Education comprehensive database, Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS).
For those schools in our sample which do not report retention rates to the U.S. Department of
Education (notably Hillsdale College), we obtained the data by other means. The data we used
were the retention rates reported in IPEDS for Fall 2012.
In the final computation to obtain the rankings, the data for the actual retention rate were
weighted so that they constituted a 12.5 percent importance in determining the final Forbes
ranking.
Summary of the Statistical Model
In addition to incorporating the actual retention rate component, we also included a statistical
model to predict an institutions retention rate based upon a variety of demographic and
institutional input factors. The primary source of the data used in the model is the U.S.
Department of Education IPEDS database. We used a number of student demographic factors in
our model including proportional enrollment by ethnicity, the percentage of students who are
female (or, equivalently, the percentage who are male). Similarly, we also included the
percentage of the undergraduate population who are between the ages of 25 and 65 and the
percentage of students attending part-time. Additionally, we used student financial aid variables,
such as the percentage of students receiving any grants, percentage receiving Pell grants, average
5

amount of Pell grant received, percentage using financial aid, and the average amount of federal
loans students borrow. We also included measures of institutional selectivity: 25th percentile
SAT scores, percent of applicants admitted and the matriculation rate. We also included various
measures of per student spending, the student-faculty ratio, tuition and enrollment. Finally, we
also controlled for type of institution, degree of campus urbanization and geographic location.
In constructing the model, we first transformed the retention rate variable with the logistic
transformation (also known as the log of the odds ratio) to account for the bounded nature of the
retention rate data. We then regressed this variable against the aforementioned independent
variables using the least squares method. Due to the nature of the logistic transformation, we do
not encourage interpretation of coefficient estimates on retention rates and therefore suppress
them in this methodology.14
A school received a better score for this metric by having an actual retention rate that exceeded
that predicted by the regression model, controlling for difference between the actual retention
rate and the perfect retention rate of 100 percent. Conversely, a school received a lower score
if the actual retention rate fell below the models predicted rate. In the overall Forbes rankings,
this retention model accounts for 2.5 percent.

Facebook School Satisfaction Survey (2.5%)

The 2015 Forbes/CCAP college rankings is the first year to employ input from social media when
compiling the rankings. Forbes distributed a short survey via Facebook during the time leading up to the
rankings release. Respondents were asked where they attended school and how satisfied they were with
their experience on a scale from 1 to 5 where 5 is extremely positive and 1 is extremely negative.
Precautions were taken in the construction of the survey to prevent more than one response from the same
IP address.
In the end, the survey gathered more than 10,000 responses. After cleaning the data, over 10,000
responses remained to be used in the rankings. To calculate a schools Facebook Satisfaction Survey
score, a simple arithmetic average was calculated which yielded the average student satisfaction score for
that school.
Considering this is the first year that Facebook has been used to compile the rankings, it was assigned a
relatively low weight of 2.5 percent of the overall rankings. This way, the new information from the
Facebook survey is factored into the rankings while maintaining the rankings consistency year-overyear. However, due to variance in the number of responses from school to school, we had to change the
weights for schools with very few or no responses. If a school did not have any responses, the Facebook
survey weight was 0, and other weights were increased proportionally so the school would still have a
score from 0 to 100. Likewise, if a school had fewer than 5 responses, the Facebook survey weight was
changed to 1.25% and other weights were increased proportionally.

Salaries of Alumni from PayScale.com (10%)

PayScale.com is a market leader in global online compensation data. Both employers and
employees use the website to better gauge the current job market. The PayScale Salary Survey,
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which is updated frequently, is one of the largest online salary surveys in the world. Persons
complete the PayScale Salary Survey in exchange for a free salary report that anonymously
compares them to other people with similar jobs in similar locations. In addition to individual
surveys, PayScale receives data from employers administered on behalf of trade associations.
Why this measure?
For many (if not most) college students, the bottom line of higher education is whether it helps
them get a good job after graduation. Other things being equal, students will choose a school that
provides them the opportunity to earn the highest possible salary upon graduation. Historically, it
has been difficult, if not impossible, to obtain institutional level data on the salaries of college
graduates. The salary data published by Payscale is among the most comprehensive salary data
publicly available and these data are increasingly used by higher education policy analysts
seeking to quantify the economic returns to higher education and compare how those returns
vary by school and major of study.15 While some may criticize the Payscale data as unreliable
due to problems associated with self-selection bias, we view these data as reasonably reliable,
particularly in light of the fact that there is not better institutional level data available at the same
scope and because these data are used by credible higher education policy analysts in other
research.
Calculating the Schools Scores
We used salary data for 1-4 years experience and data for 10-19 years experience. Specifically,
we used salary data for 1-4 years experience as an estimate for beginning salaries and the growth
in salary from 1-4 years experience to 10-19 years experience. Taking the growth rate between 14 year and 10-19 year is an indicator of value-added skills that were learned during school, both
technical and soft skills. In other words, we believe that the acceleration of growth in salary is
just as important starting salary throughout a career. There were 44 schools that did not have
Payscale data available so their scores were reweighted accordingly. The composite salary score
is weighted at 10 percent of the overall rankings.

American Leaders List (22.5%)

One measure of postgraduate success is the attainment of a position of leadership in an important
American institution or sector. To the extent that collegiate-level education is critical for
preparing individuals for prominent careers, those institutions which are more successful in
producing more leaders in these sectors will be more attractive to prospective students seeking to
become leaders.
Developing the Dataset
Our American Leaders data includes information on the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and
the Board of Directors (BOD) of the 543 American corporations listed in the 2014 edition of
Forbes Global 2000 Leading Companies. We also included data on the President and Board of
Directors (or Trustees) of the non-profit organizations that appeared in the 2014 edition of
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Forbes 100 Largest U.S. Charities and the individuals listed on Forbes 30 under 30 and
Worlds Most Powerful Women. Additionally, we gathered information on those who have
been elected to the National Academy of Sciences or have been awarded a Nobel Prize (20042013), Pulitzer Prize (2004-2013), Guggenheim Fellowship (2005-2014), or MacArthur
Fellowship (2004-2013). Our list of American Leaders contains members of the Big Five
orchestras (located in New York, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Cleveland) and winners of
an Academy (2005-2014), Emmy (2004-2013), Tony (2004-2013), or Grammy Award (General
Field, 2004-2013).
We have also included biographical information for nearly 1,900 federal officials, including the
governors of all 50 states and the four American territories (American Samoa, Guam, Northern
Mariana Islands, and Puerto Rico), all one hundred United States Senators and 441 United States
Representatives (including delegates from the American territories and the District of Columbia),
all 849 Article III judges appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate for lifetime
appointments (a number which includes nine Supreme Court Justices, 177 Court of Appeals
judges, 9 Court of International Trade Judges, and 654 District Court judges), and 506 members
of the executive branch (including the President and Vice President of the United States,
members of the Cabinet, senior members of the bureaucracy within each Cabinet department,
and the heads of major non-cabinet agencies). We have also included the President and Board of
Directors of the 12 Federal Reserve banks.
Data on the educational background for each of these leaders was obtained through various
sources. We removed any duplicates (for instance, an individual serving as CEO at one of the
leading corporations who also served on the board of one of the leading charities) to avoid
double counting. After obtaining our complete sample, totaling approximately 30,000 names, we
removed the duplicates, as well as the individuals for whom no relevant collegiate information
could be found. This process produced our total sample size of 17,600 usable individuals. After
computing the absolute number of leaders who received degrees from each school, we adjusted
the absolute number by the average undergraduate enrollment at each institution in 1980, 1985,
1990, 1995, 2000, and 2005 in such a way as to both account for the absolute number of notable
alumni a particular college produced as well as that number of alumni as a proportion of the
historic enrollment. This composite score accounts for 22.5 percent of the overall Forbes/CCAP
ranking for each institution.

Average Federal Student Loan Debt Load (10%)

Student debt is incorporated in the ranking as a measure of the relative affordability of attending
a particular school. The figure used for student debt is the average federal student loan debt for
the entire undergraduate population at the various institutions. The data for the student debt is
obtained from the U.S. Department of Education database (IPEDS), and the figure is the average
federal student loan taken out (the average among only borrowers) by all undergraduates
multiplied by the percentage of all undergraduates who take out federal student loans for the year
2012.16

Two private institutions in our sample (Hillsdale College and Grove City College) did not have
any students who took out federal student loans in 2012. The debt data are weighted at 10
percent of the overall Forbes ranking.

Student Loan Default Rates (12.5%)

Student loan default rates are a measure of quality for an institution, in that default rates may
provide insight into whether students can manage the debt accumulated from attending the
institution. Schools of a higher caliber should enhance a students post graduate opportunities
and the ability to pay back student debt, even if the students from that school have relatively
higher debt burdens in absolute terms. Conversely, schools which have students with relatively
lower debt loads in absolute terms yet have a lower likelihood of obtaining employment to pay
those loans back should be less attractive to prospective students. Therefore, a low student loan
default rate is considered better in our rankings.
Student loan default rates are gathered and calculated by the U.S. Department of Education. We
use the two year cohort default rate in these rankings; this default rate is the percentage of people
defaulting on either Federal Family Education Loans (FFEL) or William D. Ford Federal Direct
Loans within two fiscal years after entering the repayment period. Our rankings took a three year
average of the cohort default rates for fiscal years 2009, 2010 and 2011.17
Several institutions in our sample do not participate in Title IV federal financial aid programs
and therefore have no student loan default rate in the U.S. Department of Education dataset.
Grove City College and Hillsdale College fall in this group of institutions that do not accept
federal monies; therefore, these two schools federal loan default rates are zero. For these two
institutions and the military academies, the default rate our model assigns them is zero. The
default rate data are weighted at 12.5 percent of the overall Forbes/CCAP rankings.

Predicted vs. Actual Average Federal Student Loan Debt Load (2.5%)
We have also incorporated a model which predicts the average amount of federal student loan
debt each undergraduate will accrue so we can evaluate institutions on how affordable they are,
given certain characteristics of the schools and their respective student bodies. For this measure,
we used only results of the statistical model as a component of the rankings.
We used a number of student demographic factors in our model including proportional
enrollment by ethnicity and the percentage of undergraduates who are non-resident aliens.
Additionally, we used student financial aid variables, such as the average amount of grant aid
received, percentage receiving Pell grants, and institutional support spending per student. We
also included measures of institutional selectivity such as 25th percentile SAT scores, percent of
applicants admitted and the matriculation rate. We also controlled for endowment funds per
student, tuition and enrollment. Finally, we controlled for type of institution, degree of campus
urbanization and geographic location.

In constructing the model, we first transformed the average debt load with the simple logarithmic
transformation. We then regressed this new variable against the aforementioned independent
variables using the least squares method. Similar to the retention rate and graduation rate models,
we do not encourage interpretation of coefficient estimates and therefore suppress them in this
methodology. The results from our statistical model account for 2.5 percent of the overall
ranking.

Four-Year Graduation Rates (7.5%)

Graduation rates, in part, measure how effectively institutions of higher education deliver the
education they provide to their students. The higher a colleges four-year graduation rate, the
higher the proportion of students who fulfill the requirements for their academic program of
study within the normal time of study. The higher this proportion of students, other things equal,
the lower the cost for a student to obtain a college education. Our measure for graduation rates
includes two components: the actual four-year graduation rate and the results of a statistical
model predicting what each schools graduation rate should be.
Why Use Four-Year Graduation Rates?
Traditionally, college education in America has been viewed, particularly by students and their
parents, as a four-year educational investment. In recent times, the higher education sector has
increasingly relied upon five or even six-year graduation rates as a measure for student
completion success at American colleges and universities. Consistent with our approach in
constructing previous rankings, we have chosen to incorporate the four-year graduation rate
rather than the five or six-year graduation rates used in other college rankings. All of the schools
(except for Hillsdale College) included in this sample are classified as offering instructional
programs which are 4 years or more by the U.S. Department of Education, making it perfectly
legitimate for assessing these schools using a four-year graduation rate. After all, prospective
students arguably view that 4 years or more classification as an indication that they can
graduate from any of these schools within four years.
Using the four-year graduation rate is not beyond criticism. Several schools included in this
sample focus heavily on five-year academic programs (this is particularly true of some of the
STEM intensive schools which require not only four years of academic study but also one year
of co-op/internship experience in addition). For these schools, many students take more than four
years in order to satisfy the requirements for graduation. However, we believe that using a fouryear graduation rate is valid, because these schools are included in the traditional four-year
college classification and because some students at these schools do in fact graduate within four
years. Arguably, a four-year graduation rate is a more meaningful measure than either a five or
six-year rate, because according to the U.S. Department of Education, normal time for
completion of a bachelors degree is four years.
Summary of the Statistical Model

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We rely upon a statistical model to predict what a schools four-year graduation rate is expected
to be based on a number of input criteria which measure the academic quality of incoming
students. In order to capture the quality of students, we use 25th percentile composite SAT
scores, acceptance rates, full-time enrollment rates (how many admitted students actually
matriculate), percentage of students receiving Pell Grants, percentage of students enrolled in
STEM majors,18 a dummy variable for public or private institutional control, and regional
dummy variables. We first transformed the four-year graduation rate data with the logistic
transformation (occasionally referred to as the log of the odds ratio) to account for the particular
bounded nature of that variable. We next regressed this transformed variable against the list of
regressors mentioned above using the least squares method. Due to the nature of the logistic
transformation, and the history of even respected academics misinterpreting the coefficient
estimates, we do not encourage interpretation of coefficient estimates on graduation rates and
therefore suppress them in this methodology.
A school received a better score by having an actual graduation rate that exceeded the one
predicted by the regression model, controlling for difference between the actual graduation rate
and the perfect graduation rate of 100 percent. Conversely, a school received a lower score if
the actual graduation rate fell below the models predicted rate.
A Note on the Data Sources
The primary source for the data used was the U.S. Department of Educations IPEDS database.
The actual graduation rate, according to IPEDS, is computed by dividing the total number of
students completing a bachelor degree or equivalent within 4-years (100% of normal time) by
the revised bachelor sub-cohort minus any allowable exclusions. The IPEDS database is also
the source of the data for the variables used in the statistical model, with a few exceptions. There
were several schools (notably Hillsdale College) where the data came from other sources. In
cases where current data were unavailable at any of these sources, we developed estimates based
on the most recent publicly available data.
The graduation rate component accounts for 7.5 percent, apportioned between the actual
graduation rate (5 percent) and the graduation performance of a school relative to its predicted
graduation rate (2.5 percent).

Students Receiving Nationally Competitive Awards (7.5%)

Every year students from colleges and universities across the country compete for highly
prestigious student awards. Analyzing the number of award winners per school serves as an
indicator of how well an institution is preparing its students to successfully compete for these
awards. Winning a nationally competitive award assumes that the student is not only thoroughly
academically prepared and qualified but also possesses other qualities such as a high level of
motivation or initiative, leadership, etc.
The following eight nationally competitive student awards were considered with the years of
award observations included in parentheses:
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The Rhodes Scholarship (2006-14)

The British Marshall Scholarship (2006-14)
The Gates Cambridge Scholarship (2006-14)
The Harry S. Truman Scholarship (2010-14)
The Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship (2011-14)
National Science Foundation (NSF) Fellowships (2011-14)
The Fulbright U.S. Student Program (2011-14)
USA Today All-Academic First and Second Teams (2006-10)
The Rhodes, Marshall, and Gates-Cambridge Scholarships are included because they are widely
recognized as three of the most selective and prestigious of all postgraduate awards to
undergraduate students. The list of USA Today All-Academic First and Second Teams include
winners from across the country and are some of the most accomplished college students across
many different academic disciplines for the years included in our dataset.
The remaining four awards attempt to encompass a variety of different academic backgrounds.
The Truman award is directed toward students interested in pursuing careers in public service
while the Goldwater Scholarship targets students pursuing careers in the natural sciences,
mathematics or engineering. National Science Foundation (NSF) Fellowships are awarded to
students wishing to pursue graduate study in the sciences (including social sciences),
mathematics and engineering. Finally, the Fulbright U.S. Student Program offers fellowships to
U.S. graduating undergraduate students (in addition to young professionals and artists) to travel
abroad for one academic year to conduct research, study or teach English as a second language.
We use observations across a range of years to expand the sample size of awards in our database.
However, because the number of recipients varies across the different awards, the range of years
we used for capturing observations varies by award. For instance, the Rhodes, Marshall and
Gates-Cambridge scholarships, because they are widely viewed as the most prestigious awards,
necessarily have the smallest number of awards given out each year so the range of years we
used for cataloging recipients of these awards is larger than for the other awards we count in this
factor. Furthermore, we gave greater weight to the prestigious awards in order to reward
institutions for producing students of greater achievement.
We also account for the enrollment size of an institution. A school with a greater number of
students, other things equal, has a better chance of winning an award. The number of award
winners is adjusted by the schools average full-time equivalent undergraduate enrollment such a
way as to both account for the absolute number of award recipients a particular college produced
as well as that number of award recipients as a proportion of the enrollment. The enrollment
12

adjusted numbers for student award recipients account for 7.5 percent of the final score for each
school in the overall ranking.

Alumni Receiving PhDs (2.5%)

For some students (admittedly not all), an important goal of their undergraduate education is
preparation for continuing their academic education in graduate school, with the ultimate goal of
receiving a doctorate degree, often a prerequisite for pursuing an academic career. The National
Science Foundations Survey of Earned Doctorates, which began in 1957-58, collect[s] data
continuously on the number and characteristics of individuals receiving research doctoral
degrees from all accredited U.S. institutions and includes data on the number of persons
receiving such degrees each year by the institutions from which they received their baccalaureate
degree.19
For our purposes, we took a three-year average of all persons receiving a research doctorate from
2010 to 2012 and adjusted by the average undergraduate enrollment (from 2001 to 2003) at the
institution which granted the baccalaureate degree. We chose to adjust by the average
undergraduate enrollment for that three year period to reflect, approximately, the median time to
completion of a research doctorate after conferral of the undergraduate degree, as reported by the
National Science Foundation.20 This final score accounts for 2.5 percent of the overall ranking.

A Note on the Best Value Ranking

For many students, the price of a school is as important a factor in deciding where to go to
college as its quality. Knowing where you can get the most quality for each tuition dollar spent is
important for those shopping on a budget. Answering this question is the goal of this years
Best College Buy ranking for 2015. To produce the ranking, we divided each schools overall
quality score (which was computed using the methodology described earlier) by its 2013
published in-state tuition and fees, the most recent year for which IPEDS data are available.21
Published tuition is the amount of tuition and fees required of students as payment for the cost of
receiving their collegiate education. Published tuition does not include any financial aid (whether
scholarships, grants, or other forms of aid which do not need to be repaid) that students directly
receive from government, institutional or other sources. For those schools which charge $0
tuition and fees to students (e.g., the service academies) or those schools which automatically
offer all students scholarships or grants valued at the full price of tuition (e.g., College of the
Ozarks),22 we arbitrarily set their tuition and fees at $0.01, to ensure a minimum. One school that
historically did not charge tuition to students was The Cooper Union. In the past two years,
however, its Board of Trustees decided to start charging tuition to some students.23 Thus, its
tuition and fees are no longer arbitrarily set at $0.01 in the Best Value Rankings. After obtaining
this list of schools, we remove those schools with four-year graduation rates that fall below 20
percent, using this 20 percent rate as a baseline level of quality (since the overall list contains
only 650 schools, it is possible that some which are low quality appear on the best value list

13

simply because they have low tuition. In the spirit of maintaining a list that indicates high
quality, and not just low tuition, this adjustment is necessary).

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Endnotes
1

The compilation of these rankings was done at the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, although in
cooperation and active consultation with the staff of Forbes. At CCAP, Director Richard Vedder, with the assistance
of Joshua Distel, oversaw the project team which included: Ryan Brune, Amanda Denhart, Virginia Ewen, Zakary
Frank, Daniel Garrett, Devon Halliday, Robert Hammer, Joseph Hartge, David Holman, Samuel Kissinger, Matthew
LeBar, Trevor Marburger, Timothy McKenna, Jacob Newton, Brady OBrien, Maxwell Pristic, Jonathan Robe,
James Roy, Michael Stock, Justin Strehle, William Vosler, and Jasper Wirtshafter.
2

For further information on this system of classification, see The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of
Teaching, The Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, available at:
http://classifications.carnegiefoundation.org/, accessed July 21, 2014.
James Otto, Douglas A. Sanford Jr., and Douglas Ross. Does ratemyprofessor.com really rate my professor?
Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education 33, no. 4 (August 2008): 355-368.
3

We should note, however, that if we assume that the distribution of student ratings on ratemyprofessor.com is
symmetric about the mean and that the students who submit those ratings are only either disgruntled or excessively
happy about their professors (that is, the censoring decision is also symmetric about the mean), then given a
sufficiently large sample, the expected mean using the truncated sample would, in fact, be equivalent to the true
mean using a sample of all students. For a formal mathematical proof, see:
http://www.centerforcollegeaffordability.org/uploads/RMP_Proof.pdf
James Otto, Douglas Sanford and William Wagner. Analysis of Online Student Ratings of University Faculty.
Journal of College Teaching and Learning 2, no. 6 (June 2005): 25-30.
5

Yining Chen and Leon B. Hoshower. Student Evaluation of Teaching Effectiveness: An Assessment of Student
Perception and Motivation, Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 28, no. 1 (2003).
6

Michael E. Sonntag, Jonathan F. Bassett, and Timothy Snyder. An Empirical Test of the Validity of Student
Evaluations of Teaching Made on RateMyProfessors.com, Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education (July
2008). See also, Scott Jaschik. Validation for RateMyProfessors.com? Inside Higher Ed, April 25, 2008, available
at http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/04/25/rmp, accessed July 1, 2013.
7

Theodore Coladarci and Irv Kornfield, RateMyProfessors.com Versus Formal In-class Evaluations of Teaching,
Practical Assessment, Research & Evaluation (May 2007).
8

Otto, Sanford, and Ross.

April Bleske-Rechek and Kelsey Michels. RateMyProfessors.com: Testing Assumptions about Student Use and
Misuse, Practical Assessment, Research and Evaluation 15, no. 5 (May 2010).
10

James Felton, Peter T. Koper, John Mitchell, and Michael Stinson. Attractiveness, Easiness, and Other Issues:
Student Evaluations of Professors on RateMyProfessors.com, the abstract page of which is available on
http://ssrn.com/abstract=918283, accessed on August 5, 2010.
11

12

Bleske-Rechek and Michels, p. 9.

For further discussion of Bayesian approaches to rankings see James O. Berger and John Deely. A Bayesian
Approach to Ranking and Selection of Related Means With Alternatives to Analysis-of-Variance Methodology
Journal of the American Statistical Association 83, no. 402 (June 1988): 364-373.
13

15

14

One prominent example of a misinterpretation of a logistic regression coefficient is discussed in the following
letter to the editor: Andrew Gelman, Letter to the editors regarding some papers of Dr. Satoshi Kanazawa Journal
of Theoretical Biology 245, no. 3 (April 7, 2007): 597-599
For a two examples of this use of PayScale salary data, see: Philip R. P. Coelho and Tung Lui, The Returns to
College Education, working paper, Department of Economics, Ball State University, August 12, 2012 (available at:
http://econfac.iweb.bsu.edu/research/workingpapers/bsuecwp201202coelho.pdf) and Mark Schneider and Jorge Klor
de Alva, Who Wins? Who Pays? The Economic Returns and Costs of a Bachelors Degree, NEXUS and
American Institutes for Research, May 2011(available at:
http://www.air.org/files/WhoWins_bookmarked_050411.pdf).
15

16

Federal Loans are by far the most common form of undergraduate loans. In the 2011-12 academic year, more than
90% of all undergraduate loans (in terms of total dollars) originated from federal loan programs according to the
College Board. See: Sandy Baum and Kathleen Payea, Trends in Student Aid: 2012, Washington, DC: The
College Board, 2012, p. 17.
The underlying data we used can be obtained from the U.S. Department of Educations Office of Student
Financial Assistance Programs website at: http://www2.ed.gov/offices/OSFAP/defaultmanagement/cdr.html.
17

18

This control variable was added to address the (valid) criticism that, other things equal, students enrolled in STEM
majors tend to take more time to graduate because of the higher rigor associated with their fields of study. The
addition of this control variable allows us to take into account that schools with higher percentages of students
enrolled in STEM majors will likely have lower four-year graduation rates. Thus, these schools should not be
penalized by the model because of the higher percentage of STEM students.
For more information about the Survey of Earned Doctorates, see the National Science Foundations website at:
http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/srvydoctorates/. We should note that the NSFs dataset on earned doctorates included
institutions which do not report data IPEDS or participate in Title IV financial aid programs.
19

20

As of 2012, the National Science Foundation reports that the median time to completion of a doctoral degree from
the time of conferral of the bachelors degree was 9 years. See National Science Foundation, Science and
Engineering Doctorates: 2012, Table 31, available at: http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/sed/2012/data_table.cfm.
21

For private schools, in-state tuition and fees is the same as out-of-state tuition.

22

Berea College in Kentucky also offers their students full scholarship and grant coverage for the cost of tuition, but
according to the IPEDS data, students are required to pay an $876 fee to the school for the year.
23
This statement from The Cooper Unions Board of Trustees explains in further detail its change in tuition policy:
http://www.cooper.edu/about/trustees/board-trustees-statement-future-plans-cooper-union.

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