<ul style="padding-left: 1rem; caret-color: rgb(26, 29, 38); color: rgb(26, 29, 38); font-family: Roboto, "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 18px;"><li style="margin-bottom: 0.5rem;">Student Outcomes (52% total weight):This tracks a school's success in preparing students for life after college. It includes bachelor's degree graduation rates (16%) and first-year retention (5%), along with a school's performance against a predicted graduation rate (10%). Success for low-income students is measured by the Pell Graduation Rate (5.5%) and Pell Graduation Performance (5.5%), which credit schools for enrolling and graduating students with significant financial need. Post-graduation metrics assess median federal loan debt (5%) and earnings five years after graduation (5%), with top scores for schools where 95% of graduates earn above a high school graduate's typical income.</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.5rem;">Peer Assessment (20%): This factor captures key aspects of a school's quality, such as innovative teaching and institutional health, which are often difficult to measure otherwise. Presidents, provosts and deans rate institutions in their category with which they are familiar on a 5-point scale.</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.5rem;">Faculty Resources (11-15% total weight):U.S. News measures a school's commitment to quality instruction using three factors. A school earns a higher score for a lower student-faculty ratio (3% for National Universities; 4% for others), a higher proportion of instructional faculty employed full-time (2%; 3%), and higher average full-time instructional faculty salaries (6%; 8%).</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.5rem;">Financial Resources (8%): Measures per-student spending on academic programs and services. This excludes non-core expenses like housing and recreation.</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.5rem;">Standardized Tests (5%): Assesses median SAT/ACT scores of the incoming class, with adjustments for higher reporting. If in successive years fewer than half of applicants provided scores, a school instead had the weight reallocated to graduation rates.</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.5rem;">Faculty Research (4%, National Universities only): For more information, see "A More Detailed Look at the Ranking Factors." Faculty research includes four factors from a five-year window (2020-2024) that measure a school's research impact. Metrics include a university's average citations per publication, its field-weighted citation impact, and the share of its publications in the top 5% and top 25%of journals, based on Elsevier's CiteScore. Adjustments were made for schools with fewer than 5,000 publications to ensure fair comparisons.</li></ul>