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How Essence and Money Ranked the Best Colleges for African Americans

Strike up the band: Florida A&M topped our list of HBCUs and came in fifth in our overall rankings. - Courtesy of Florida A&M
Strike up the band: Florida A&M topped our list of HBCUs and came in fifth in our overall rankings. Courtesy of Florida A&M

The staffs of Essence and Money interviewed researchers, students, and professors and analyzed newly available data on more than 1,500 public and private four-year colleges to find the schools that offer the best combination of opportunity, educational value, affordability, and advantage in the job market.

We downloaded the latest available data about each college from the U.S. Department of Education as of January 2016. The Georgetown Center for Education and the Workforce performed value-added analyses on newly available data on student debt repayment rates and post-college earnings. Mark Schneider of College Measures served as our consultant and statistical adviser. But the final decisions on data and weighting were made by Essence and Money staff. Here are the factors and weightings we used:

Educational quality: 50%. We gauged educational quality by three sub-factors:

Affordability: 35%. We used seven sub-factors to estimate each college's affordability:

Outcomes: 15%. Georgetown's Center for Education and the Workforce analyzed data on the earnings of freshmen who started college in 2001 (as reported in the federal College Scorecard) to provide us with two sub-factors

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