Baylor Rises to 71st in U.S. News Rankings

October 13, 2014

In the latest rankings released by U.S. News & World Report, Baylor University climbed to No. 71 among National Universities, achieving the University’s best rating since the publication began ranking institutions beyond the top 50 in 2002. Baylor was ranked 75th by U.S. News in 2013.

Schools in the National Universities category offer a full range of undergraduate majors, plus master’s and doctoral programs, and also are committed to producing groundbreaking research.

Among the highlights for Baylor in this year’s U.S. News rankings:
• Baylor is the second-highest ranked Big 12 Conference school behind only the University of Texas at Austin (No. 53).
• Baylor is the fifth-highest ranked Texas university Rice (No. 19), Texas (No. 53), SMU (No. 58) and Texas A&M (No. 68).
• Baylor jumped seven places to No. 45 in the U.S. News High School Counselor Rankings with a high school counselor score of 4.1, the University’s best since U.S. News began using the metric in 2010.

To rank universities, U.S. News places each school into a category based on its mission as a research university or liberal arts college and gathers data from and about each school in up to 16 areas related to academic excellence. Each indicator is assigned a weighted (expresses as a percentage) based on the publication’s judgments about which measures of quality matter most and ranks schools based on their composite weighted score.

Other data highlights from Baylor’s latest U.S. News rankings:
• 42 percent of students in the top 10 percent of their high school classes – highest since 2009.
• 51 percent of classes under 20 – highest since 2012.
• 86 percent freshman-retention rate over a four-year period – highest since 2009.
• Baylor’s two-year average alumni giving rate of 15 percent – highest since 2011.

Data for the 2015 edition of Best Colleges were gathered in the spring and summer of 2014.