Note: This ranking was discontinued in 2021.
The USA Ranking shines a light on the best institutions from across the country.
To be eligible for this ranking, institutions must be categorised as either "Doctoral Universities" or "Master's Colleges and Universities" according to the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education.
Universities are evaluated according to 17 indicators falling into 4 broad groupings: Employability, Diversity & Internationalisation, Learning experience, and Research.
The Employability category is designed to look at the employment prospects of students graduating from US institutions, through metrics that include the results of our Employer Reputation Survey, Alumni Outcomes and salary post-graduation.
The Diversity & Internationalisation category attempts to understand to what extent a higher education institution is striving towards being as inclusive as possible, while promoting an environment that seeks to achieve UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5: Gender Equality and SDG Goal 10: Reduced Inequality. This category includes the following indicators: gender pay gap, faculty gender diversity, ratio of undergraduates receiving Pell grants, students’ ethnicity, number of Fulbright students and ratio of international students.
The Learning Experience category aims to reflect the overall learning environment provided by a higher education institution to its students, through the level of support it offers all its students regardless of socioeconomic background, as demonstrated through metrics including retention rate, student-faculty ratio, teaching spending and graduation rates of students with and without federal financial
support.
The Research category is designed to demonstrate how the research of a higher education institution is having an impact and contributing to Knowledge Creation. It focuses on the quality of the research and how open and internationally collaborative its research outputs are, whether within academia or with industry. This category includes the following metrics: academic reputation, citations per
paper, partnerships with employers and the International Research Network (IRN) indicator.
The set of indicators for our USA Ranking and their weights are shown below, linking to their fuller descriptions in our methods section where available. The indicators are listed below by weighting.
| Indicator | Weight |
| Academic Reputation | 13.5% |
| Alumni Outcomes | 10% |
| Teaching Spending (instructional expenditure per FTE student) | 10% |
| Employer Reputation | 10% |
| Citations per Paper | 7% |
| International Research Network | 5% |
| Fulbright Recipients | 5% |
| International Students | 5% |
| Pell Grant Recipients | 5% |
| Retention | 5% |
| Student Ethnicity | 5% |
| Salary after 10 years | 4.5% |
| Pell Grant Student Graduation Rates | 3.5% |
| Faculty-Student Ratio | 3.5% |
| Partnerships with Employers per Faculty | 3% |
| Faculty Gender Diversity | 2.5% |
| Gender Pay Gap | 2.5% |