[ SOURCE: usnews.com ]

For the second straight year, Hope International University has been recognized as one of America’s Best Colleges by U.S. News, ranking in the Top 20 among Regional Colleges (West). “This ranking is an external validation of the high quality and value of an HIU education,” remarked Michael Mulryan, HIU’s Vice President for Institutional Advancement. “Our outstanding faculty and staff continually strive to enhance our students’ overall collegiate experience and this ranking reaffirms the choice our students have made to attend HIU.”

The annual U.S. News Best Colleges rankings help prospective students and their families compare institutions as they look for the right school. The host of intangibles that makes up the college experience can't be measured by a series of data points. But for families concerned with finding the best academic value for their money, the U.S. News Best Colleges rankings provide an excellent starting point for the search.

“Regional Colleges” focus on undergraduate education but grant fewer than half their degrees in liberal arts disciplines. These colleges are further divided and ranked in four geographical groups: North, South, Midwest, and West. The vast West region extends from Texas and Oklahoma to Alaska and Hawaii.

The U.S. News ranking system rests on two pillars. The formula uses quantitative measures that education experts have proposed as reliable indicators of academic quality, and it's based on their researched view of what matters in education. 

First, regionally accredited schools are categorized by their mission, which is derived from the breakdown of types of higher education institutions as refined by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in 2010. The Carnegie classification, which is used extensively by higher education researchers, has been the basis of the Best Colleges ranking category system since these rankings first were published in 1983.

Once schools have been divided by category, U.S. News gathers data from each college on up to 16 indicators of academic excellence. Each factor is assigned a weight that reflects their judgment about how much that measure matters. Finally, the colleges and universities in each category are ranked against their peers, based on their composite weighted score.

To see details of HIU’s scores and key indicators, visit http://ow.ly/S0zCN.

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