FAQ: Best Colleges Rankings vs. Obama's College Rating Framework

The U.S. Department of Education has released a framework that describes how the administration will execute its new college rating system, first proposed in August 2013. The administration says its first ratings of institutions will be released before the start of the 2015-2016 school year.

Here are answers to some of the questions that U.S. News has been asked most frequently about the federal ratings plan and the U.S. News Best Colleges rankings, and how U.S. News views the proposed rating system.

What does U.S. News think about the recently released framework of the president's college rating plan?

The president's plan is to create a rating system that takes into account access, affordability and student outcomes. We welcome the fact that the president believes college ratings are a good idea and that they provide meaningful comparative information to students and their parents.

The federal college rating system is still a work in progress, since almost all the methodology and key data decisions have yet to be finalized. The fact that so many aspects of the president's college ratings are undecided and still subject to further study and analysis also points to the reality that it's very difficult to rate colleges.

What we do know is that the president's college ratings will not be a numerical ranking and thus will be very different from the U.S. News Best Colleges rankings, which determine which schools are tops in undergraduate academic quality. The U.S. News rankings aim to provide prospective students with key comparative information on colleges to help them in their college application process. We believe the rankings should be used as just one tool during this search.

What does the president's plan mean for students and parents?

One potential big benefit of the president's plan is that for the first time, far richer comparative data will become available from colleges and the U.S. Department of Education for consumers, especially prospective students and their families.

For example, the college ratings could lead to the release of information for the first time on the proportion of a school's enrollment who did not have a parent who attended college, how many students go on to graduate school or how graduates have fared in terms of earning and employment. Data could also become available on the student loan repayment and default of an institution's former students.

Another positive is that the Obama administration is committed to making public all the data used in its college rating, so others could publish it and use it analytically. The framework states, "In addition to releasing the ratings, the Department will release the data used to construct them to facilitate transparency and provide policymakers and researchers with data to inform their efforts to identify which policies best increase access and improve quality."

The bottom line: More and improved data will be better for everyone planning to apply to college.

What will U.S. News do with these new detailed student outcomes and other data?

Currently, the U.S. News Best Colleges rankings methodology incorporates outcome measures such as graduation and retention rates. We also use graduation rate performance, which measures the difference between each school's predicted graduation rate -- based on characteristics of the incoming class closely linked to college completion, such as test scores and Pell Grants -- and its actual graduation rate. These three outcome factors, in total, count for 30 percent of the rankings and are the most heavily weighted indicators in our methodology.

We also do a separate ranking of the Best Value Schools, taking into account a school's academic quality and the net cost of attendance for a student who receives the average level of need-based financial aid.

U.S. News already publishes lists of which schools are most economically diverse, using the proportion of students with Pell Grants, as well as which campuses have the greatest ethnic diversity.

When U.S. News has access to more robust outcomes data that could come from the Obama administration's college ratings, such as college graduate earnings or graduate school attendance, we will seriously study incorporating that data into our Best Colleges rankings. We would also be able to publish the new data as part of each school's profile on our website. At this time, however, such comparable postgraduation student outcome measures don't exist and have never been published.