College rankings are gaining importance as more employers look at top-ranked colleges for top-rate employees. Although most individuals know that rankings based upon statistics often are biased, rankings have had a two-fold impact: they provide an impetus for colleges to perform better; and, they provide a tool that helps prospective students choose a college.

U.S. News Best Colleges 2009

Methodology: U.S. News has collected data from more than 1,400 colleges to bring this year’s rankings to you. You can search through categorized rankings by region or by study choices such as law or medicine. You can learn more about schools with the highest or lowest acceptance rate, the colleges with the most students over age 25, and the school that grants the most merit aid. All these rankings are created with different methodologies, but the majority were based upon statistical information provided by each school. U.S. News obtained missing data from sources such as the American Association of University Professors, the National Collegiate Athletic Association, the Council for Aid to Education, and the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics.

StudentsReview: Top 50 Colleges and Universities

Methodology: The calculations of all rankings are based upon e following measurements: Educational quality 50 percent; academic success based on ‘understanding 25 percent, creativity encouragement 12 percent, “work useful” five percent, faculty accessibility four percent and university funding use four percent. Student surveys are filtered for duplicate and invalid surveys prior to ranking, and a rule-base system was created to identify duplicates and model trends of surveys from the same machine. A resulting filter, correlation matrix, and survey model is applied uniformly to all surveys to produce results. These rankings are constantly updated on a monthly basis.

Top 100 Universities in North America

Methodology: 4 International Colleges and Universities (4icu.org) is a search engine that develops rankings based upon Web popularity rankings. The ranking is based upon an algorithm that includes three independent Web metrics abstracted from Google Page Rank, Yahoo! Inbound Links and Alexa Traffic Rank. They assure readers that they do not claim to rank anizations or their programs by the quality of education or level of services. The 4icu.org Web Popularity Ranking is updated every six months.