HOUSTON – Rice moved up a spot to become the No. 6 Best College in America in the Niche Best Colleges ranking for 2023, the Pittsburgh-based school search website said in a news release on Monday.
Rice is also No. 7 in Best Value Colleges (up from No. 10 last year), a ranking the website said it “think(s) will only become more important as students and parents more closely evaluate a school’s potential return on investment.”
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Niche said it updated its methodology this year to better evaluate a school’s value. On the public side, University of Houston is the No. 10 Best College in Texas and No. 5 among the Top Public Universities in Texas.
The top 10 2023 Best Colleges in America are:
1. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
2. Stanford University
3. Harvard University
4. Yale University
5. Princeton University
6. Rice University
7. California Institute of Technology
8. Duke University
9. Brown University
10. Dartmouth College
With updated data for 4,050 colleges nationwide, Niche’s new rankings feature an updated methodology to better evaluate an institution’s return on investment, or ROI.
To create the college rankings, Niche combines data from sources such as the U.S. Department of Education with user input — reviews and ratings from current students, alumni, and parents — in a thorough analysis of factors including academics, campus, and value for the financial investment to name a few.
The most significant change made this year was an overhaul of the Value methodology. As Value is a factor in numerous categories, the change impacted many rankings, including the overall Best Colleges. Four factors in the previous methodology were dropped in order to end reliance on older, less comprehensive data sets. New factors — sourced from the US Department of Education, American Community Survey (ACS), and Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) — include average ROI by age 30, median earnings one year after graduation, percent of graduates employed two years after graduation, year over year difference between first and second year earnings and more.
“Even before the pandemic, high school students and their families were questioning the value of higher education, in large part due to how expensive it’s become in the past twenty years or so,” said Ryan Bell, principal strategist at Niche. “Our updates to our value methodology come at a time when prospective college students are more intent on choosing a school that will yield a good return on investment than ever before. We hope our new and improved value rankings will help those students make one of the most important financial decisions of their lives.”