Is CNBC’s education ranking for North Dakota accurate?

CNBC recently released its annual “America’s Top States for Business” rankings, which compare all 50 states across 10 categories. One of those categories is education, where North Dakota came in 11th.

The 2026 education ranking is up significantly from last year’s 25th spot. But does it accurately reflect the quality of North Dakota’s education system?

My colleague John Phelan has already picked apart how erratic CNBC’s methodology is year to year. Looking more closely at the education category, there is also a transparency issue. CNBC’s methodology page says it factors in K-12 test scores, class size, and spending, plus higher-ed factors like the number of colleges in a state and “long-term trends in state support.”

What it doesn’t say is which test scores count, or how much each factor is weighted. By including spending as a factor, does CNBC reward states that spend more even when they achieve similar (or worse) outcomes to states using fewer resources? The methodology also blends a state’s K-12 outcomes with something as unrelated as its number of universities. This makes it hard to tell what specifically moved a state’s rank from one year to the next. (Such as, what contributed to North Dakota’s big jump in the education category?)

Even if we assume the test scores are National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results, as it’s the only national K-12 assessment that allows state-to-state comparisons, the ranking relies on raw state averages. A statewide average can look strong while hiding how unevenly a state’s schools and its policies are serving different groups of students.

That’s why the Urban Institute has, for nearly 10 years, published demographically adjusted NAEP results. The estimates are designed to make state comparisons less dependent on differences in student demographics. And the results dramatically switch up North Dakota’s position on the leaderboard.

CNBC’s education rank rewards inputs and institutional characteristics as much as — if not more than — outputs such as student outcomes. A closer look leaves North Dakota’s education ranking looking considerably less impressive than an 11th-place finish suggests.