Best States Ranked: Where Does Illinois Stand?

Which is the best state in the country?

According to a new series of rankings released by U.S. News and World Report, that title belongs to Massachusetts.

The inaugural rankings were compiled by evaluating all 50 states across a range of criteria from education and health care to infrastructure and the economy. The rankings were developed using McKinsey and Company’s “Leading States Index,” which combines thousands of data points across 68 specific metrics.

After Massachusetts, the best states are New Hampshire, Minnesota, North Dakota and Washington.

The 68 metrics in the “Leading States Index” were separated into 20 groups, which were further arranged into the following seven categories:

• Health Care
• Education
• Infrastructure
• Crime and Corrections
• Opportunity
• Economy
• Government

All categories were weighted based on a national survey that asked people to prioritize seven categories in their state, such as education, crime and others in the order of most important and least important. Health care and education received the highest weightings nationwide.

In the seven categories, Massachusetts is No. 1 in education, Hawaii is No. 1 in health care, Oregon is No. 1 in infrastructure, Vermont is No. 1 in crime and corrections, New Hampshire is No. 1 in opportunity, Colorado is No. 1 in economy and Indiana ranks No. 1 for government.

So where does Illinois stand? According to the rankings, the Prairie State is the 29th best state in the country.

Read more:

Illinois Is Not the Worst-Run State — But It's Close: Study

Illinois Ranks 37th Out of 50 States for Well-Being: Study

Here’s how Illinois ranked across all seven categories:

• Health Care: 32
• Education: 20
• Infrastructure: 10
• Crime and Corrections: 29
• Opportunity: 19
• Economy: 44
• Government: 47

U.S. News had this to say about the Land of Lincoln:

Today, about 2.7 million of Illinois’ nearly 13 million residents call the Windy City home – the nation’s third largest city. The next most populous cities in the state are Aurora, Rockford and Joliet, only Aurora home to more than 200,000 people. ... Thousands of Illinois residents are moving out of the state, especially the Chicago area, fleeing high taxes, crime, the unemployment rate and bad weather. In 2015, the state recorded minimal change in population since 2010 – less than 1 percent growth to the U.S.’ 4.1 percent. ... Walgreens, Boeing, State Farm, Sears and United are headquartered in the state. In addition to business, Illinois’ largest industries are manufacturing, education, agriculture, energy and biotechnology.

Click here for more information about how Illinois fares across all categories.

NOTE: The data was pulled from various sources, with government data being favored over other sources due to its reliability. For each set, U.S. News used the most recent data available as of Dec. 22, 2016. Because datasets have different schedules for updates, data come from different years and months. This allowed U.S. News to pull many more data points. All data will be updated again for the 2018 relaunch of Best States. In some cases, data for certain states are missing because not all states provide data for all metrics. In other cases, especially in states with small populations, there weren’t enough people to have a statistically significant sample in a given year, which led to missing values. Metrics with missing data from the calculation of rankings for those states were omitted. Ties were rare in the dataset because scores were calculated to the maximum amount of decimal places without rounding. In some cases, where the score was from a letter grade, such as the digitization index, there were ties. Best States didn’t rank Washington, D.C., or U.S. territories such as Puerto Rico. Data for Washington, D.C. were included for national averages. You can see all the raw data behind the Best States ranking on the Data Explorer.

Image via Patch file

By Feroze Dhanoa (Patch National Staff)