AUBURN MOVES UP
SIGNIFICANTLY IN U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT RANKINGS

Auburn University is ranked 38th among public universities nationwide and as the state’s top university, according to an annual survey by U.S. News & World Report.

Auburn is ranked among the nation’s top 50 public universities for the 13th consecutive year. This year’s ranking was its best in the survey since 1999, when it also ranked 38th, and a four-spot improvement over last year, when U.S. News ranked it 42nd among public schools.

“Obviously the Auburn family was pleased to learn that AU has improved its national standing,” said AU interim President Ed Richardson. “These improvements are the result of hard work by the faculty, staff and administration and the commitment by the Board of Trustees to establish and support long-term improvements. I remain optimistic that further improvements will be forthcoming.”

Auburn’s Samuel Ginn College of Engineering was ranked 67th nationally overall among universities that offer doctoral engineering programs. The college was ranked 40th among public universities in the same category.

The newsstand book, America’s Best Colleges, which contains the U.S. News college rankings, may be ordered from www.usnews.com. Most of the rankings and some of the articles from the book were in the Aug. 23 issue of U.S. News & World Report, the weekly newsmagazine.

To establish its rankings U.S. News categorizes colleges and universities primarily by mission and, in some cases, region. The magazine then gathers data from each on up to 15 indicators of academic excellence, assigning each factor a weight that reflects the magazine’s judgment about how much each measure matters.

The indicators the magazine staff uses to capture academic quality fall into seven categories: academic reputation among its peers, retention of students, faculty resources, student selectivity, financial resources, alumni giving, and (for national universities and liberal arts colleges) the graduation rate performance, or the difference between the proportion of students expected to graduate and the proportion who actually do.