A note on methodology: 4-year colleges and universities.

There are two primary goals to our methodology. First, we considered no single category to be more important than any other. Second, the final rankings needed to reflect excellence across the full breadth of our measures, rather than reward an exceptionally high focus on, say, research. Thus, all three main categories were weighted equally when calculating the final score. In order to ensure that each measurement contributed equally to a school's score within any given category, we standardized each data set so that each had a mean of zero and a standard deviation of one. The data were also adjusted to account for statistical outliers. No school's performance in any single area was allowed to exceed five standard deviations from the mean of the data set. Thanks to rounding, some schools have the same overall score. We have ranked them according to their pre-rounding results.

The set of colleges included in the rankings has changed since last year. For the 2011 rankings, we included all colleges ranked by U.S. News & World Report in 2010. U.S. News changed its selection criteria in 2011 and we wanted a clear set of rules for including or excluding colleges, so we developed specific criteria for the Washington Monthly rankings. We started with 1,762 colleges that are listed in the U.S. Department of Education's Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) as having a Carnegie basic classification of research, master's, baccalaureate, and baccalaureate/associate's colleges and were not exclusively graduate schools. We then excluded 145 colleges which reported that at least half of the undergraduate degrees awarded in 2009-10 were not bachelor's degrees as well as the seventeen colleges with fewer than 100 undergraduate students in fall 2010. Next, we decided to exclude the five federal military academies (Air Force, Army, Coast Guard, Merchant Marine, and Navy) because their unique missions make them difficult to evaluate using our methodology. Our rankings are based in part on the percentage of students receiving Pell Grants and the percentage of students enrolled in ROTC, whereas the service academies provide all students with free tuition (and thus no Pell Grants) and commission graduates as officers in the armed services (and thus not the ROTC program). Our final set of exclusions was to not rank colleges that had not reported any of the three main measures used in the social mobility section (percent Pell, graduation rate, and...