U.S. News Announces the 2016 Best Colleges

"We are the only organization that has been ranking schools for over three decades," said Robert Morse, chief data strategist at U.S. News. "Over that time we have improved our information and sharpened our methodology's focus, with one of the biggest updates being a greater consideration of output measurements."

The college ranking categories are based upon the 2010 Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching classifications. The Carnegie classification system has been used by U.S. News since the first Best Colleges rankings in 1983, because they are accepted as the basis for classifying schools by most higher education researchers.

In an exclusive arrangement, the launch of the 2016 edition of Best Colleges is being sponsored by Fidelity Investments. For more information about Best Colleges,