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

To establish the set of colleges included in the rankings, we started with the 1,550 colleges in the 50 states that are listed in the U.S. Department of Education's Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) and have a 2018 Carnegie basic classification of doctoral, master's, and baccalaureate colleges, are not exclusively graduate colleges, participate in federal financial aid programs, and had not announced an impending closure as of June 15, 2021. We then excluded 28 colleges with fewer than 100 undergraduate students in any year they were open between fall 2017 and fall 2019 and an additional four colleges with fewer than 25 students in the federal graduation rate cohort in 2018 and 2019.

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 47 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 1,466 colleges and includes public, private nonprofit, and for-profit colleges.

In the face of changing data availability, we assembled a metrics advisory group of seven higher education experts to advise us on updating our main rankings. The board consisted of Fenaba Addo of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Beth Akers of the American Enterprise Institute; Michael Itzkowitz of Third Way; Konrad Mugglestone and Eleanor Eckerson Peters of the Institute for Higher Education Policy; and Nicole Smith and Martin Van Der Werf of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. Our changes to this year's rankings reflect these conversations and the advisory group's focus on equity and value for all students.

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...

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