Battered by funding cuts, bombarded by the White House and braced for demographic changes set to send enrollment into a nosedive, America’s colleges and universities have spent this year in flux.
But one of higher education’s rituals resurfaced again on Tuesday, when U.S. News & World Report published the college rankings that many administrators obsessively track and routinely malign.
And, at least in the judgment of U.S. News, all of the headline-making upheaval has so far led to … well, a lot of stability.
Princeton University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University retained the top three spots in the publisher’s rankings of national universities. Stanford University kept its place at No. 4, though Yale University also joined it there. Williams College remained U.S. News’s pick for the best national liberal arts college, just as Spelman College was again the top-ranked historically Black institution.
In one notable change, the University of California, Berkeley, was deemed the country’s top public university. But it simply switched places with its counterpart in Los Angeles.
For those picking (or running) an American college, U.S. News is a pre-eminent purveyor of water-cooler talk, despite longstanding misgivings about whether trying to rate colleges is even a good idea.
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The post U.S. News Rankings Are Out After a Tumultuous Year for Colleges appeared first on New York Times.
