While there are many overlapping reasons for a college education, we classify the purposes of college to the following. Click the category name for a top ten list, and the the ‘info’ button on the right for more about that category.
College Deliberately’s rankings are based on the comparative frequency of terms and phrases that are related to, or indicative of, the educational purpose in question.
Our web crawler visits every college and university’s website about once every three months to stay current. Our rankings are updated quarterly.
If you want to see historical rankings, please visit the subscription shop to purchase an institutional license.
To view the top ten for each state, visit the Colleges by State listing.
Most colleges do not confine themselves to just one purpose, but place emphasis on a few of these. It is rare, however, to find a college that designs its curriculum around all of them. We’ll tell you which colleges emphasize which goals, so you can make the most of your college experience.
