Best States Ranked: Where Does Rhode Island Stand?

NEWPORT, RI— 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 healthcare 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 Rhode Island stand? According to the rankings, Little Rhody is the 21st best state in the country.

There are some surprises, too. While struggling Rhode Islanders may not be startled to see the relatively poor ranking at 32nd for economic opportunity, U.S. News and World Report gave Rogue's Island a high grade for state integrity. That was "measured by looking at 13 categories, including electoral oversight, public access to information, lobbying disclosure, state civil service management and ethics enforcement agencies," the report said. Rhode Island ranks fifth, albeit in a tie with Ohio. "All of these categories provide insight into each state’s transparency and accountability, and how well they are safeguarding their government from partisanship and conflicts of interest," U.S. News and World Report said.

The report also gave the state a high score for Crime and Corrections, which looked at prison overpopulation, among other criteria.

Here’s how Rhode Island ranked across all seven categories:

• Health Care: 7
• Education: 31
• Infrastructure: 35
• Crime and Corrections: 3
• Opportunity: 32
• Economy: 18
• Government: 38

U.S. News had this to say about Rhode Island:

Today, Rhode Island is the second most densely populated state after New Jersey, and more than a million people call the tiny state home. With about 179,000 residents, Providence, the capital and home to strong colleges, is the most populous city, followed by Warwick, Cranston, Pawtucket and East Providence, which houses fewer than 50,000 people. Though Providence is among the most racially diverse cities in the country, the rest of the state lacks variety. About 74 percent of Rhode Islanders are non-Hispanic whites, though the African-American, Native American, Asian and Hispanic populations have all grown since 2010.

At $58,073, the median household income in 2015 was slightly above the national average of $55,775, and the poverty rate was lower than average.

Click here for more information about how Rhode Island 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

Feroze Dhanoa (Patch National Staff) contributed.