Best States Ranked: Where Does Maryland Stand?

(Updated at 11:17 a.m.) What 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, says the publication.

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 Maryland stand? According to the rankings, the charm state is the eighth best state in the country.

Here’s how Maryland ranked across all seven categories:

• Health Care: 14
• Education: 5
• Crime and Corrections: 22
• Infrastructure: 14
• Opportunity: 5
• Economy: 21
• Government: 18

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

“Maryland has made tremendous strides in turning our economy around, improving education, and working to ensure that every single Marylander has the opportunity to succeed,” said Gov. Larry Hogan in a statement. “We have made incredible progress over the past two years, but there is still more work to do to continue making Maryland the very best place to live, work, raise a family, and retire.”

The Hogan administration touted its funding of K-12 education and investments in higher education as part of the reason for the state's strong showing in the education category, as well as programs like the Pathways to Technology Early College High School schools that opened in Baltimore City in 2016 and continue to expand across the state.

During his tenure, Hogan says Maryland has created 73,000 jobs and the unemployment rate has dropped to 4.2 percent, an eight-year low.

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.

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