(This story was updated to add new information.)
The University of Florida fell one spot to No. 7 among public universities in the U.S. News & World Report’s latest rankings , released Tuesday.
The U.S. News & World Report evaluates nearly 1,500 colleges and universities across the country using 17 measures of “academic quality.” It has put an emphasis in recent years on social mobility — the graduation rate of economically disadvantaged students — and post-graduate success.
Top factors included in the rankings this year were peer assessment (20%), graduation rates (16%), graduation rate performance (10%), financial resources per student (8%) and faculty salaries (6%).
The peer assessment is a “measure of how a school is regarded by top administrators at other institutionsand accounts for qualitative attributes of schools that may not be fully captured by the other rankingfactors.”
UF’s ranking, down from a high of No. 5 among public universities in 2022, puts it in a tie with the University of Texas-Austin. The University of California-Los Angeles was rated the No. 1 public university.