OEDb's Online College Rankings 2007: Methodology

Update: OEDb has released the 2008 rankings. This is an archived page from the 2007 rankings.

In putting together this methodology, we strived to be balanced and objective. To that end, we used only quantitative, reliable metrics with data from authoritative third parties. We do realize that no methodology is perfect, but we did our best to weed out any factors that would obviously skew the results.

Online College Inclusion Criteria

We wanted our rankings to include the most significant undergraduate degree-granting online colleges that operate nationally. Since there is no single authoritative list of online colleges on the Web — at least none that we could find — we went through multiple sources to find our initial list of colleges which we would consider for these rankings. Each source we chose is both well known and trusted. The colleges were culled from these sources from January 8, 2007 – January 10, 2007.

• DETC — Institutions accredited by the Distance Education and Training Council are primarily distance learning based.


• DMOZ — Since DMOZ is the largest human-edited directory in the world, we felt it would provide a good listing of the most notable online colleges in the US, as determined by a human editor. Obviously we had already found all the colleges accredited by DETC, but many primarily-online colleges are accredited by regional bodies, which would not have been listed by DETC.


• eLearners.com — Similar to DMOZ, eLearners.com provides an large list of online colleges which we did not want to miss.


• US News & World Report's E-Learning Guide — To make sure we didn't miss any notable online institutions that were regionally accredited and not listed in the aforementioned DMOZ category or on eLearners.com, we included any college listed in the US News & World Report's E-Learning Guide's top 20 largest and top 20 oldest degree-granting online programs.

We then narrowed down these the list of colleges compiled from these four sources, based on the following criteria:

1. The college must be accredited. A college must be accredited for its degrees to be respected by most employers and other legitimate higher learning institutions.


2. The college must be listed in COOL. The College Opportunities Online Locator (COOL) was commissioned by the US Department of Education to help prospective students compare higher education opportunities. We decided to exclude colleges not listed in COOL for two reasons: firstly, it would be impossible to rank them accurately without the trusted third-party metrics that COOL provides; secondly, we felt that any college not already in COOL was not notable and/or important enough to be included in our rankings.


3. The college must offer more than one undergraduate degree-granting program online. We wanted to exclude specialty colleges which only offered degrees in one subject.


4. The college, if campus-based, must offer at least 50% of its undergraduate degree-granting programs online. There are hundreds of colleges and universities nationwide that offer online programs. But very few are primarily online-based. Our rankings strive to rank only those that are primarily online-based.

The list of colleges used for our rankings is by no means comprehensive or perfect, but by using this methodology for selection we believe we included the majority of the biggest, most important, and/or most notable primarily-online colleges and universities in the United States.

The Ranking Metrics

For each metric, we ranked the colleges from 1 to 21, where 1 is the highest, or best, rank. To see the ranking for each individual metric, see the links on the left.

How We Weighted the Metrics

It was not apparent to us that any single metric was more important than any other, and further, assigning a weight to every metric would have been arbitrary. Therefore, we weighted each of the eight metrics equally.

How We Ranked the Colleges

The overall ranking for each college is simply an average of all of the metric rankings for which data was available for that college.

Adjusted Rankings

There were some metrics for which we could not find data on all of the colleges that we ranked. In these cases, we did not reward or punish the colleges for which data could not be found; instead, these particular colleges simply received no ranking for the particular metric. For the colleges for which data was available, each college received an adjusted ranking, so that the top college received a ranking of 1, but the bottom college received a ranking of 21, no matter how many colleges were actually ranked for that particular metric.

The formula used to calculate the adjusted ranking for colleges not ranked #1 is:

$[(t\; -\; 1)\; /\; (d\; -\; 1)]\; +\; p$

Where t equals the total number of colleges (21), d equals the number of colleges for which data was available (varied from metric to metric), and p equals the previous ranking.

Metric Qualifications

To include a particular metric in our rankings, that metric needed to be:

• Quantitative.
  Using only quantitative metrics would ensure that there was no subjectivity in calculating our rankings.


• Measured by a trusted third party.
  Those third parties included COOL, the US Department of Education's Office of Postsecondary Education, and trusted Web search engines.


• Correlated with how attractive it would be to attend a college.
  It could be argued that some of the metrics we used have only a weak correlation to the attractiveness of attending a college, but since metrics on these colleges are so scarce we decided that any positive correlation in our eyes, however weak, should be included.

The Metrics We Used

• Acceptance Rate — A colleges's overall quality and prestige is in part determined by it's selectivity (of which acceptance rate is an indicator). The acceptance rate figures are provided by the College Opportunities Online Locator database from the Institute of Education Sciences, a sub-agency of the US Department of Education. The data is for the Fall 2005 entering undergraduate class.



• Financial Aid — Financial aid is a high priority for most prospective college students. The higher the percentage of students who receive financial aid, the more desirable the college should be to attend. The data in the "Percentage of Students Receiving Financial Aid" column refers to the percentage of undergraduate students receiving financial aid for the 2004-05 academic year. The financial aid figures are provided by the College Opportunities Online Locator database from the Institute of Education Sciences, a sub-agency of the US Department of Education.


• Graduation Rate — The graduation rate is an indicator of success of a college's students in attaining their educational goals. The figures are provided by the College Opportunities Online Locator (COOL) database from the Institute of Education Sciences, a sub-agency of the US Department of Education. COOL defines graduation rate, for 2005, as the percentage of full-time, first-time undergraduate students beginning a program in 1999 who graduated within 150% of the normal time to program completion. (For example, for a four-year program, the graduation rate includes students who graduate withing six years of beginning the program.)


• Peer Web Citations — The peer Web citations metric could be considered a proxy for a college's relative status among other colleges. Using Yahoo! Search's linkdomain:example.edu site:.edu -site:example.edu backlink command (where example.edu is the college's domain name), we can find out how many times a particular college's Web site is linked to by other college's Web sites. The site:.edu portion of the search operator weeds out backlinks from non-academic Web sites. The -site:example.edu portion of the search operator weeds out any internal linking from the college's own Web site. All searches were conducted on January 16, 2007. We used Yahoo! Site Explorer rather than Google because Google returns only a random sample with its link: operator.


• Retention Rate — A college's retention rate reflects the student body's overall interest in what's being offered by the college. This one figure can explain many factors that compose the attractiveness of a college, including the administration's competence, the quality of its teaching staff, the quality of the curriculum, the willingness of its students, and the perceived value of what is being taught. The retention rate figures are provided by the College Opportunities Online Locator (COOL) database from the Institute of Education Sciences, a sub-agency of the US Department of Education. COOL defines retention rate, for 2005, as the percentage of first-time bachelor's (or equivalent) degree-seeking undergraduates from the fall of 2004 who again enrolled in the fall of 2005.


• Scholarly Citations — As studied by Mike Tung, a graduate student at Stanford University, citations from other scholars is a widely-recognized indicator of the importance of academic work. Mainstream colleges and universities often are judged by the quantity, quality, and importance of the research they put out, and there is no reason that online colleges shouldn't be likewise judged. A college is only as good as its students and faculty. Google Scholar provides a way to search for scholarly literature, which makes it a useful proxy for the amount of citations a particular college receives.


• Student-Faculty Ratio — The more personal attention a student is able to receive from his/her professors, the more the student will become engaged in the subject matter. Nowhere is this reflected better than a college's student-faculty ratio, which can be found at Peterson's College Search. The lower this ratio, the more attractive a college should be in this regard.


• Years Accredited — For our rankings, we only included online colleges accredited by an institutional accrediting agency officially recognized by the Office of Postsecondary Education, an operating unit under the authority of the US Department of Education. For each college, we looked at how long it had maintained its accreditation status, since a longer period of accreditation implies more name recognition and prestige, as well as the continual competence of the college's administration.

Again, while this methodology may be imperfect, as is any methodology of this nature, we do want to stress that at the very least it is quantitative and objective, relying solely on hard data as opposed to subjective interpretation. We acknowledge that this certainly won't be the final say in online college rankings, and welcome any feedback at contact@oedb.org.

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