U.S. News Ranks Scranton No. 6 in 2021 Guidebook
U.S. News & World Report has ranked The University of Scranton among the top 10 “Best Regional Universities in the North” for the 27th consecutive year. U.S. News ranked Scranton No. 6 in the 2021 edition of the “Best Colleges” guidebook, which became available online today.
U.S. News also ranked Scranton No. 14 in its category in its “Best Undergraduate Teaching” listing of the top colleges in the nation expressing “a strong commitment to undergraduate teaching.”
In addition, Scranton was ranked No. 40 as a “Best Value Regional University in the North,” which compares academic quality of programs to cost of attendance. This is the eighth consecutive year U.S. News has recognized Scranton as a “Best Value” school. Scranton was ranked No. 136 in its category in a new listing U.S. News of “Top Performers on Social Mobility,” which looks at schools that enroll and graduate “large proportions of disadvantaged students awarded with Pell Grants.”
In national rankings, as opposed to listings by category, U.S. News included Scranton among America’s “Best Undergraduate Business Programs,” ranking Scranton at No. 201 in the U.S., and among the nation’s “Best Undergraduate Engineering Programs,” ranking Scranton No. 141 among schools where a doctorate is not offered. Also, in national rankings of all business programs in America, U.S. News ranked Scranton’s finance program at No. 30, its entrepreneurship program at No. 36 and its accounting program at No. 44 in the country.
U.S. News changed the methodology used in its rankings this year to include graduate indebtedness among the data used to determine a school’s “outcomes” assessment, which represents 40 percent of the overall score. Other factors in the “outcomes” assessment include a social mobility score, freshman retention, graduation rates and graduation performance rates, which compares a school’s actual graduation rates with predicted graduation rates based on characteristics of the incoming class.
In addition, U.S. News considers a range of quality indicators for its ranking that includes peer assessment of academic excellence (20 percent); faculty resources (20 percent), which now includes regional cost-of-living adjustments to faculty pay and benefits; student selectivity (7 percent); financial resources (10 percent); and alumni giving (3 percent).
U.S. News categorizes colleges for their rankings based on the official Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching classification of universities.
The 2021 U.S. News “Best Colleges” rankings became available online Sept. 14. The printed edition of the guidebook will be available in bookstores Oct 27.