US Colleges
Resume Signal, explained
Editorial membership, then a published rubric — not a quality ranking and not a hiring claim.
August 12, 2026
Last reviewed October 18, 2026. Resume Signal is a curated shortlist of U.S. undergraduate institutions. Membership — which 100 names appear — is editorial. Order inside that roster is a published rubric. It is not a claim that these colleges are the best teachers, the best bargains, or the best fit for you, and it is not evidence about who receives interviews or job offers.
The weights
- Selectivity, 50%: College Scorecard admission rate (ADM_RATE). Inside this roster, a lower rate scores as a higher percentile.
- Earnings, 35%: College Scorecard median earnings 10 years after entry (MD_EARN_WNE_P10). A higher figure scores as a higher percentile. It describes a past cohort. It is not a personal forecast, and it mixes what a college does with who it enrolls.
- Editorial brand, 15% cap: 1 for schools on the Ivy League roster committed in this repo, plus Stanford, MIT, Caltech, Chicago, and Duke. Everyone else on the list scores 0. The flag is a human label for cross-regional name recognition. It is not a survey and not a hiring result. The weight is capped so the two Scorecard inputs outweigh it.
- TODO(owner): national reach is not scored. Out-of-state share and international share (Scorecard UGDS_NRA or IPEDS residence) are not in this repo. Missing values are not estimated.
How a rank is produced
- Each Scorecard input is turned into a percentile within these 100 schools. Ties on an input share an average rank.
- The composite is the weighted sum. Remaining ties break by lower admission rate, then higher 10-year earnings, then lower UNITID.
- No editorial rank overrides are applied. If one is added later, it will carry a one-line reason on the list page.
- Tier 1 through Tier 5 are rank bands (1–20, 21–50, 51–75, 76–90, 91–100). They are labels for filtering, not judgments about impressiveness.
Blurbs on each row are still editorial notes about reputation. Read them as notes, not as measured outcomes. If you want a single federal measure with no brand flag, leave Resume Signal and open a metric list or the engine.
Open Resume SignalEditorial membership, rubric order, Scorecard inputs.