Magazine

WCU Places Solidly in
2024 U.S. News Rankings

This is the second year WCU has been ranked by U.S. News in the National Universities category due to WCU being recognized as an R2 Doctoral University, exhibiting high research activity.

Our improvement in these rankings over last year now places the University #209 overall out of 435 institutions — in the top half of all National Universities, which includes the Ivy League schools plus MIT, Drexel, Northwestern, and others.

Among top public schools, WCU ranks #112 out of 227. WCU is tied with Florida Atlantic University, Illinois State University, and the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, putting WCU in the top half of institutions.

In the category for Top Performers on Social Mobility, WCU is listed at #222 out of 434.

Overall, WCU made two other lists: Best Value Schools #111 out of 211; and Best Colleges for Veterans #147 out of 176.

How WCU Compares
to Other Public R2 Universities

When all the R1 and R3 institutions in the National Universities category are removed, there are 128 R2 institutions including WCU; of these, 91 are public R2s.

WCU’s Office of Institutional Research examined the U.S. News data and identified interesting points that prove WCU remains not only competitive with peer institutions, but also excels.

• U.S. News predicted WCU’s graduation rate to be 63% but our actual rate is 72%. Our over-performance of 9 percentage points ranks us #16 out of 128, placing us in the top 13% of institutions.
• Among all 128 R2 institutions, WCU’s fall first-year student retention percentage of 82% ranks us #46 out of 128 institutions, putting us in the top 36% of these institutions.
• Looking at only the public R2s (91 institutions), WCU’s first-year retention rate places us at #17; our graduation rate places us at #8; and our Pell grant recipient graduation rate places us at #13.

WCU’s ranking is relative to other institutions: It is not only determined by our own performance on measures, but how other institutions perform on those measures.

In total, U.S. News collected data on more than 1,800 institutions and ranked nearly 1,500 schools.

U.S. News calculated rankings using 19 key measures of academic quality and graduate outcomes for National Universities, and there were significant changes in their methodology. Five ranking factors that were in the previous edition’s formula — alumni giving, class size, high school class standing, the proportion of instructional faculty with terminal degrees, and the proportion of graduates who borrowed federal loans — were removed from the formula to place greater focus on outcomes measures and to rely on data universally reported by schools or obtainable from third-party sources. U.S. News increased the emphasis on how often schools’ students from all socioeconomic backgrounds earned degrees and took advantage of information on graduate outcomes that was not available until recently.