[08/09]
Auburn moves up, ranks among Top 50 public universities for 17th
consecutive year in U.S. News survey
Auburn University
is
ranked 39th among public universities nationwide, according to an
annual survey released by U.S. News & World Report today. The
ranking marks the 17th consecutive year the magazine has ranked Auburn
among the nation's top 50 public universities.
Auburn
ranked 20th among
land-grant institutions and 88th in the nation among both public and
private schools.
The
undergraduate program of
Auburn's Samuel Ginn College of Engineering is ranked 64th nationally
overall and 36th among public universities that offer doctoral programs
in engineering. Rankings of other programs are released at various
times during the year by U.S. News & World Report.
"The
U.S. News ratings are
based on indicators that some prospective college students may value,
such as general reputation or selectivity," said Drew Clark, director
of Auburn's Office of Institutional Research and Assessment. "But
Auburn also uses assessments that provide direct information on equally
important indicators of quality, such as how much students are actually
learning and what kind of college experience they have."
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.
The
newsstand book, "America's
Best Colleges," which contains the U.S. News college rankings, may be
ordered from www.usnews.com and will be shipped to bookstores today.
Contact:
Deedie Dowdle (334)
844-9999 (dowdldk@auburn.edu), or
Mike
Clardy, (334) 844-9999
(clardch@auburn.edu)
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