To come up with our 2019 list of New Jersey’s Best Towns for Families, we first eliminated those towns with populations less than 1,500, due to unsubstantial data. For the remaining municipalities, we collected data for average home sale prices (NJ Division of Taxation), violent crime and non-violent crime data  (NJ Department of Law and Public Safety), public high school performance (we specifically looked at the percentage of students at each high school taking AP/IB classes, the percentage of students scoring a 3 or higher on AP/IB tests, the percentage of students scoring above the state average SAT reading score of 551 and the state average SAT math score of 552, the percentage of students still in college 18 months after high school graduation, the 4-year adjusted cohort graduation rate (the number of four-year graduates divided by the number of first-time ninth-graders who entered the cohort four years earlier) and the percentage of students taking at least one visual and performing arts course (NJ Department of Education), median household income (US Census), the percentage of families with children under the age of 18 (US Census), mean travel time to work (US Census), percentage of families with less than 70% of one ethnicity to find diverse populations (US Census), the effective tax rate in each municipality (NJ Division of Taxation), and the number of hospitals within 10 miles (Health Grades). Based on the aggregated data for each of the municipalities, we developed an algorithm to determine our ranking.
See the Full 2019 List of NJ’s Best Towns for Families