U.S. News & World Report has released its 2025 College Rankings. Here are the Top 25 National Universities and Liberal Arts Colleges:
| Rank | National Universities |
| 1 | Princeton |
| 2 | MIT |
| 3 | Harvard |
| 4 | Stanford |
| 5 | Yale |
| 6 | Cal-Tech |
| 6 | Duke |
| 6 | Johns Hopkins |
| 6 | Northwestern |
| 10 | Penn |
| 11 | Cornell |
| 11 | Chicago |
| 13 | Brown |
| 13 | Columbia |
| 15 | Dartmouth |
| 15 | UCLA |
| 17 | UC-Berkeley |
| 18 | Rice |
| 18 | Notre Dame |
| 18 | Vanderbilt |
| 21 | Carnegie Mellon |
| 21 | Michigan |
| 21 | Washington University |
| 24 | Emory |
| 24 | Georgetown |
| 24 | Virginia |
Prior Years’ U.S. News National University Rankings:
2025 U.S. News Liberal Arts College Rankings:
| Rank | Liberal Arts Colleges |
| 1 | Williams |
| 2 | Amherst |
| 3 | Swarthmore |
| 4 | U.S. Naval Academy |
| 5 | Bowdoin |
| 5 | Pomona |
| 7 | Wellesley |
| 8 | Carleton |
| 8 | Claremont McKenna |
| 8 |
U.S. Air Force Academy
|
| 8 | U.S. Military Academy |
| 12 | Harvey Mudd |
| 12 | Vassar |
| 14 | Barnard |
| 14 | Davidson |
| 14 | Hamilton |
| 14 | Smith |
| 14 | Wesleyan |
| 19 | Grinnell |
| 19 | Middlebury |
| 19 | Washington & Lee |
| 22 | Colgate |
| 22 | Richmond |
| 24 | Haverford |
| 25 | Colby |
Prior Years’ U.S. News Liberal Arts College Rankings:
New York Times, The U.S. News College Rankings Are Out. Cue the Rage and Obsession.:
After months of tumult on American college campuses, relative stability in one realm returned on Tuesday, when U.S. News & World Report published its oft-disparaged but nevertheless closely watched rankings.
Many top schools held the same, or similar, spots they had a year ago.
Among national universities, Princeton was ranked No. 1 again, followed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard. Stanford, which tied for third last year, fell to No. 4. U.S. News again judged Williams College the best among national liberal arts colleges. Spelman College was declared the country’s top historically Black institution, while the University of California, Los Angeles, fared best among public universities.
Few franchises in American higher education are as contentious as the U.S. News rankings. Over the decades, their publisher has faced trouble with manipulated data, complaints about murky methodologies, accusations of revenge and the foundational question of whether it is appropriate to rank colleges.
To U.S. News, which retired its print newsmagazine in 2010, the rankings are a bastion of its largely bygone influence. They are also a source of millions of dollars each year, as universities pay licensing fees to promote how they fared. U.S. News, which insists that its business relationships with schools do not affect rankings, contends that it is performing a public service by distilling a chaotic collegiate marketplace for weary consumers.
Indeed, to students and their parents, the rankings can be tools for narrowing college searches, and status symbols surrounding admissions to certain schools. To university leaders, the rankings are often publicly heralded but privately detested. To regulators, including Education Secretary Miguel A. Cardona, the rankings are responsible for “an unhealthy obsession with selectivity” and the development of “the false altar of U.S. News and World Report.” …
The top-line categories — including national universities, liberal arts colleges and historically Black colleges and universities — typically have few changes from year to year, especially at the top of the rankings. But last year, U.S. News reworked its methodology. The publisher said it was the most substantive overhaul since the rankings debuted in 1983.
Bowing to critiques that its model did not adequately account for ideals that administrators often talk about, like promoting social mobility, U.S. News put more weight on retention and graduation rates for people with need-based Pell grants. The result was that some public universities surged in the rankings, with more than a dozen jumping 50 spots or more, while a handful of private schools saw their stature drop.
U.S. News made far fewer consequential changes this year and said that its “most significant” shift was the decision to drop the six-year graduation rates of first-generation students from some formulas. The publisher said that while it “still supports this metric in principle,” it had heard feedback that the measure was insufficiently standardized to be used for comparisons.
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