It is the 12th consecutive year that AU has been ranked among the nation's top 50 public universities by U.S. News & World Report.

The magazine ranked the University of California-Berkeley as the nation's top public university.

AU interim President Ed Richardson was pleased by Auburn's continued high national ranking by the magazine.

"These rankings are the most recent indicator of Auburn University's outstanding academic quality," Richardson said. "Auburn is continually improving the quality of education it provides its students and, with everyone working together -- students, faculty and staff, administration, trustees and alumni -- we can make this a great university."

The newsstand book, America's Best Colleges, which contains the U.S. News college rankings, is on sale now. Most of the rankings and some of the articles from the book will be in the Aug. 30 issue of U.S. News & World Report, the weekly newsmagazine, which is also on sale.

To establish its rankings U.S. News categorizes colleges and universities primarily by mission and, in some cases, region. The magazine then gathers data from each on up to 15 indicators of academic excellence, assigning each factor a weight that reflects the magazine's judgment about how much each measure matters.

The indicators the magazine staff uses to capture academic quality fall into seven categories: academic reputation among its peers, retention of students, faculty resources, student selectivity, financial resources, alumni giving, and (for national universities and liberal arts colleges) the graduation rate performance, or the difference between the proportion of students expected to graduate and the proportion who actually do.