This week, U.S. News and World Report published its annual Top 100 Colleges in the United States. I immediately scanned the list to see where Creighton University ranked.

Creighton’s Master programs were ranked No. 1in the Midwest, but Creighton’s undergraduate program was not listed among the top 100 colleges.

Perplexed, I decided to investigate exactly how U.S. News and World Report came up with these rankings.

After several minutes of intense Internet searching, I struck gold.

Since 1983, The Carnegie Foundation has been the source for the classifications of this magazine as well as some of the top college rankings.

The categories produced by this institution fall under seven different groups: peer assessment, graduation and retention rate, faculty resources, student selectivity, financial resources, alumni giving and graduation rate performance (only used for liberal arts colleges and national universities).

These seven categories are then further broken down into subcategories, with the exception of a few.

Student selectivity is divided into four types: acceptance rate, high school class standing (top 10), high school class standing (top 25) and SAT/ACT scores.

Faculty resources consists of six divisions: faculty compensation, percent of faculty with top terminal degree, percent of full-time faculty, student to faculty ratio, classes with less than 20 students and classes with more than 20 students.

The graduation and retention rate category is divided into average graduation rate and average freshman retention rate.

While these categories offer data for comparing colleges, significant comparison data is lacking.

For example, faculty resources has subcategories for who actually teaches or lectures in a class. Creighton is one of the few schools that really uses its professors to teach a class, not graduate students or teacher assistants.

This does not hold true at many colleges. The Creighton faculty is always available to its students. I remember going home for Thanksgiving break and seeing the expression on my friends’ faces when I told them all of my professors knew my name.

Community service is also a category that is absent from the selection criteria.

At most colleges, service projects are part of a course, if it exists at all.

At Creighton, service is an expectation: it is the rule, not the exception.

Financial resources was another category that interested me.

Creighton does an excellent job at awarding prospective students with scholarship money.

Almost every person I have been acquainted with at Creighton received some form of scholarship money.

Academic scholarships are available at most colleges, but Creighton also awards service and leadership scholarships.

U.S. News and World Report offers prospective students with a list of top colleges, but it does not present the entire picture.

Students need to look beyond the rankings, which at times only scratch the surface, and search for criteria that tell the whole story.