After 15 Years, a New No. 1 in College Rankings

Fifteen years at the summit just ended for Princeton. The university slipped to No. 2 in the 2027 ranking of national universities by US News & World Report, reports the Daily Princetonian. The school ceded its longtime top slot to MIT, which had sat in second place for the past five years. The shake-up comes after US News added a new "earnings by major" factor and dropped its longtime measure of student debt. MIT tops the earnings metric, while Princeton lands in a tie for eighth. Another new metric tied to faculty research also helped. The New York Times notes that the value of such rankings is very much in dispute, with critics complaining of arbitrary judgments among schools whose real differences are marginal. With that in mind, the top finishers:

1. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
2. Princeton
3. Harvard
4. Yale
5. California Institute of Technology (tie)
6. Stanford (tie)
7. University of Pennsylvania
8. Duke University
9. Johns Hopkins University (tie)
10. Northwestern University (tie)
11. University of Chicago (tie)