South Eugene tops Lane County high school rankings in U.S. News list

South Eugene High School led Lane County in U.S. News’ latest high school rankings, a result that puts Eugene’s strongest college-prep options squarely in view for families deciding where to live and which schools still need to close the gap.

U.S. News released its 2025-2026 Best High Schools rankings on Aug. 19, 2025, evaluating nearly 24,000 eligible public high schools and ranking nearly 18,000 of them. The list uses six indicators, including state assessment performance, graduation rates, college readiness and how well schools serve underserved students, and it is based on the 2022-2023 school year. The Eugene-area ranking includes 33 high schools from Eugene, Springfield and nearby communities such as Cottage Grove, showing the competition extends beyond the city limits.

South Eugene ranked 16th in Oregon and 1,830th nationally. Its U.S. News profile shows a 90% graduation rate and a 40.2 college-readiness score, the strongest college-readiness mark among the Eugene School District 4J schools highlighted in the ranking. Sheldon High School followed at 23rd in Oregon and 2,551st nationally, with an 87% graduation rate and a 24.5 college-readiness score.

The ranking also shows a wider spread inside 4J. North Eugene came in 60th in Oregon, with a 77% graduation rate and a 29.6 college-readiness score. Churchill ranked 131st in Oregon, with an 82% graduation rate and a 23.6 college-readiness score. Eugene School District 4J has six high schools in all, and the rankings suggest that parents looking within the district will still find sharp differences from one campus to the next.

That matters because the state’s four-year cohort graduation rate is one of the core measures behind the U.S. News list. The Oregon Department of Education defines that rate as the share of first-time high school students in a cohort who earn a standard diploma within four years. In 4J, that figure fell to 79.0% in 2024, down 1.9 percentage points from 2023.

For Lane County families, the rankings point to both strength and unevenness. South Eugene’s top placement signals a clear local leader, but the drop in 4J’s graduation rate and the gap between South Eugene’s 40.2 college-readiness score and Sheldon’s 24.5 show that school quality still varies widely across Eugene and Springfield. Because the U.S. News system leans heavily on test results, graduation and college-going indicators, it can help identify academic momentum, but it does not fully measure the day-to-day life of a school.