How We Rate Colleges, and What the Stars Do Not Mean
Every rating on this site covers one measure against comparable colleges. There is no overall score, and there is a reason for that.
By College Path HubLast reviewed
Every star rating on this site covers a single measure, compared against colleges of the same type. There is no overall score, and that is a deliberate choice rather than an unfinished feature.
What a rating means
Four stars on affordability means a college's average net price beats roughly 80% of comparable colleges. Not that it is a good college. Not that you should go there. Just that, on that one measure, against that one group, it sits in that band.
The peer group is colleges of the same control and level, nationally: a community college is compared with community colleges, not with private universities. Every rating shows the group, the underlying number, and the share of peers beaten.
Why the bands are even fifths
Five stars means the top fifth. Four means the next fifth, and so on. That is the only banding that makes the scale informative, because a curve that hands out mostly fours and fives says nothing.
What gets no rating at all
There is no rating for selectivity and none for size. A lower acceptance rate is selectivity, not quality, and awarding stars for it would mean inventing a value judgement and hiding it inside a number.
There is also no overall score. Combining affordability, completion and earnings into one figure would require deciding how much each matters, and that depends on your circumstances rather than on ours.
Where a rating is withheld
A college that did not report a figure gets no rating rather than a zero, because a zero reads as a bad score when the truth is silence. A college with fewer than 30 comparable peers also gets none, since placing it in a "top fifth" of a handful would be noise presented as a finding.
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