Using Rankings In Your College Research

College rankings are some of the most sought-after data when it comes to identifying superior colleges and universities. People often seek rankings data out of a desire to attend the best online colleges, or maximize the value of their education. However, to maximize the usefulness of rankings, you must look closely over the raters' methodology, or the formulas they use to come to their ranking conclusions. Why does this matter? Because what's important to you in a college may not be what's important to a rankings institution.

The Chronicle of Higher Education identified 30 ways to rank a college, including emphasizing factors like total cost to students and student loan debt, or emphasizing admissions selectivity and the quality of the institution's teaching staff. Since raters focus on so many different aspects of a school, it's important to look carefully over the methodology for any rankings you come across to ensure that your priorities are reflected.

OEDb's rankings differ from others in that they are limited solely to online schools. We've created a set of objective, quantitative rankings that should help shed some light on how the top online colleges stack up against each other in 11 areas of study. For each college, we gathered data for eight different metrics — the number of full-time faculty per part-time faculty member, institutional financial aid rate, acceptance rate, retention rate, graduation rate, years accredited, default rates, and job placement rates. And unlike some other rankings, we gave all of these metrics equal weight because we believe that no one metric is more valuable than another.

While rankings are a good means of comparing the best online colleges using largely quantitative data, keep in mind that this is only one way of evaluating a school. Qualitative data, such as how happy a student is attending a specific school, the attitude and values of the student body or instructors, or how successful a student is upon graduation, are factors that are harder to quantify, but equally as important. Let our rankings help you with your initial research to determine which schools could be a good fit for you.