How do you measure a reputation? It's bogus.
Undergraduate academic reputation (22.5 percent): The U.S. News ranking formula gives significant weight to the opinions of those in a position to judge a school's undergraduate academic excellence. The academic peer assessment survey allows top academics – presidents, provosts and deans of admissions – to account for intangibles at peer institutions, such as faculty dedication to teaching.
To get another set of important opinions on National Universities and National Liberal Arts Colleges, we also surveyed 2,200 counselors at public high schools, each of which was a gold, silver or bronze medal winner in a recent edition of the U.S. News
Best High Schools rankings, as well as 400 college counselors at the largest independent schools. The counselors represent nearly every state and the District of Columbia.
Each academic and counselor surveyed was asked to rate schools' academic programs on a scale from 1 (marginal) to 5 (distinguished). Those who didn't know enough about a school to evaluate it fairly were asked to mark "don't know."
The score used in the rankings is the average score of those who rated the school on the 5-point scale; "don't knows" are not counted as part of the average. In order to reduce the impact of strategic voting by respondents, we eliminated the two highest and two lowest scores each school received before calculating the average score.
The academic peer assessment score in this year's rankings is based on the results from surveys in spring 2014 and spring 2015. Previously, only the most recent year's results were used.
Both the Regional Universities and Regional Colleges rankings rely on one assessment score, by the academic peer group, for this measure in the rankings formula. In the case of National Universities and National Liberal Arts Colleges, the academic peer assessment accounts for 15 percentage points of the weighting in the ranking methodology, and 7.5 percentage points go to the high school counselors' ratings.
The results from the three most recent years of counselor surveys, from spring 2013, spring 2014 and spring 2015, were averaged to compute the high school counselor reputation score. This was done to increase the number of ratings each college received from the high school counselors and to reduce the year-to-year volatility in the average counselor score.
Ipsos Public Affairs collected the data in spring 2015. Of the 4,530 academics who were sent questionnaires, 40 percent responded. This response rate is down very slightly from the 42 percent response rate to the surveys conducted in spring 2014 and spring 2013. The counselors' one-year response rate was 7 percent for the spring 2015 surveys.
