9/6/01
AU REMAINS TOP-RANKED STATE SCHOOL IN NATIONAL MAGAZINE SURVEY
AUBURN -- U.S. News & World Report magazine has ranked Auburn University 44th among the nation's top public universities in its annual rankings for 2001-2002.
Auburn was the highest ranking Alabama university listed among the magazine's overall top public universities. It is the ninth consecutive year that AU has been ranked by U.S. News & World Report. The University of California at Berkeley was ranked No. 1 nationally for the third straight year.
AU Interim President William F. Walker said he is pleased by Auburn's continued high national ranking in the magazine.
"The ranking is significant in that it reflects the commitment of our faculty, employees, administration and Board of Trustees to providing each Auburn student with the an educational experience second to none," Walker said.
The only Southeastern Conference-member universities ranked ahead of Auburn are the University of Florida and the University of Georgia.
The newsstand book, America's Best Colleges, which contains all of the U.S. News college rankings, will go on sale Sept. 10. Many of the rankings and some of the articles from the book will be in the Sept. 17 issue of U.S. News, which also goes on sale Sept. 10.
The method that U.S. News uses to rank colleges and universities consists of three basic steps.
The schools are categorized primarily by mission and, in some cases, region, and the magazine gathers data from each on up to 16 indicators of academic excellence. Each factor is assigned a weight that reflects the editor's judgment about how much each measure matters. Finally, the colleges in each category are ranked against their peers, based on their composite weighted score.
The indicators the magazine staff uses to capture academic quality fall into seven categories: academic reputation, retention of students, faculty resources, student selectivity, financial resources, alumni giving, and (for national universities doctoral and liberal arts colleges bachelor's) the graduation rate performance, or the difference between the proportion of students expected to graduate and the proportion who actually do. The indicators include input measures that reflect a school's student body, its faculty, and its financial resources, and outcome measures that signal how well the institution does its job of educating students.
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CONTACT: Richard Folkers, director of media relations for the 2002 edition of America's Best Colleges, 202/955-2219.