A NOTE ON METHODOLOGY: 4-YEAR COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES.

• Date: 01 September 2020

To establish the set of colleges included in the rankings, we started with colleges in the 50 states that are listed in the U.S. Department of Education's Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). Then, we winnowed that list to include only the schools that have a 2018 Carnegie basic classification of doctoral, master's, and baccalaureate colleges; that are not exclusively graduate colleges; that participate in federal financial aid programs; and that had not announced a fall 2020 closure as of July 1, 2020. That left us with 1,558 institutions. We then excluded 25 colleges with fewer than 100 undergraduate students in any year they were open between fall 2016 and fall 2018 and an additional four colleges with fewer than 25 students in the federal graduation rate cohort in 2017 and 2018.

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 the Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC), whereas the service academies provide all students with free tuition (and thus no Pell Grants or student loans) and commission graduates as officers in the armed services (and thus not the ROTC program). Finally, we dropped an additional 55 colleges for not having data on at least one of our key social mobility outcomes (percent Pell, graduation rate, net price, or the number of Pell recipients earning bachelor's degrees). This resulted in a final sample of 1,469 colleges and includes public, private nonprofit, and for-profit institutions.

Our rankings consist of three equally weighted portions: social mobility, research, and community and national service. This means that top-ranked colleges needed to be excellent across the full breadth of our measures, rather than excelling in just one. In order to ensure that each measurement contributed equally to a college's score within any given category, we standardized each data element so that it had a mean of zero and a standard deviation of one (unless noted). Missing social mobility data (affecting less than 1 percent of all observations) were imputed and noted with "N/A" in the rankings tables. We adjusted data to account for statistical outliers by allowing no college's performance in any single area to exceed five standard...