Originally published on 09/24/24

It’s time to zip up your backpack and head back to school because the U.S. News & World Report has just released its 2025 college rankings. Keep reading to discover the top colleges in the U.S. News best college list 2024, how the rankings are determined, and the controversies surrounding them!

How does the U.S. News & World Report decide its rankings? 

The publication compiles its list based on data from previous years at each college.U.S. News also said, “Across categories, schools in the middle tended to undergo larger year-to-year changes than those placing toward the top and bottom because their data is very similar to each other, whereas the highest-performing and lowest-performing schools are statistical outliers whose data is dissimilar to most other peers.” 

Speculation suggests that the U.S. News college rankings are influenced by how much schools pay to promote their rankings.

Jonathan Henry, Vice President of the University of Maine at Augusta, explains,  “I always feel like you’re closing one eye when you’re writing that check because you feel like you’re drinking from that Kool-Aid. But every year, we’ve said, ‘This is still important.’”

The U.S. News & World Report has denied these allegations. 

Due to reports of unfair scoring systems, law schools like Harvard and Yale withdrew from the rankings in 2022. According to John F. Manning, a dean at Harvard Law, “It has become impossible to reconcile our principles and commitments with the methodology and incentives the U.S. News rankings reflect.” 

The two schools’ undergraduate colleges are included in the 2025 list, and both are placed in the top 10. 

For other universities like Nebraska-Kearney, they don’t “take many of those very seriously,” according to Todd Gottula, a marketing executive at the college. 

Vanderbilt University’s chancellor Daniel Diermeier said he “understands why it makes money, but I think it has significant negative consequences.” 

What colleges are in the top 10 schools this year? 

In the 2024 U.S. News best college list, Princeton University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Harvard University, Stanford University and Yale University placed in the top five. Following was the California Institute of Technology, Duke and Johns Hopkins University, Northwestern University tied for sixth place, with the University of Pennsylvania rounding out the top ten best national universities according to the U.S. News & World Report. 

The publication also compiles a “Best National Liberal Arts Colleges” section, with Williams College, Amherst College and Swarthmore College placing in the top three. 

Who placed in the top 10 in past years? 

The 2025 list marks Princeton’s return to the top spot, as well as M.I.T., Harvard, and Stanford’s re-appearance in the top 10. This comes as no surprise, though, since many of these schools have remained there since the 1980s. 

According to the Public University Honors Standard, Harvard has been in the top 10 since 1983 and has been placed first multiple times in a row. Harvard appeared on the list in 1983 and has only dropped as low as fourth place since then.

The biggest schools to see a shift in rankings since the 80s have been the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Chicago, Cornell, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. All of these schools have since moved down lower on the list.

Link to original: https://www.womansworld.com/life/best-colleges-in-2024-resemble-the-1980s-heres-why-its-hardly-changed