SMU moved up one spot from 67 to 66 in the newest U.S. News & World Report rankings of colleges and universities. SMU is tied with Miami University in Oxford, Ohio; Purdue University;the University of Connecticut and the University of Iowa. All five schools are designated as “tier one” schools with a score of 47.
Harvard University topped the list, followed by No. 2 Princeton University, No. 3 Yale University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University tying for the No. 4 spot.
SMU also earned a spot on The Princeton Review’s list of the Best 368 Colleges.
SMU ranked No. 3 for most conservative students and No. 14 for alternative lifestyles not an alternative on The Princeton Review’s rankings. The Princeton Review ranks SMU as one of the Best Western College, and deemed SMU one of the 25 most connected campuses.
According to the U.S. News & World Report website, “To rank colleges, U.S. News first places each school into a category based on its mission (research university or liberal arts college) and-for universities offering a range of master’s programs and colleges focusing on undergraduate education without a particular emphasis on the liberal arts-by location (North, South, Midwest, and West). Universities where there is a focus on research and that offer several doctoral programs are ranked separately from liberal arts colleges, and master’s universities and baccalaureate colleges are compared against other schools in the same group and region.”
“Second, we gather data from and about each school in 15 areas related to academic excellence. Each indicator is assigned a weight (expressed as a percentage) based on our judgments about which measures of quality matter most. Third, the colleges are ranked based on their composite weighted score.”
U.S. News & World Report publishes the numeric rank of about half of the schools in each category. The remaining schools “are placed into the third and fourth tiers, listed alphabetically, based on their overall score.”
Their model, according to the website, has over time “put less emphasis on input measures of quality (which look at characteristics of the students, faculty, and other resources going into the educational process) and more emphasis on output measures (which look at the results of the educational process). This shift was consistent with the increased emphasis that educators, researchers, and policymakers have placed on results when comparing and evaluating educational programs.”
