Why did MIT become No. 1 this year?
On September 22, 2026, U.S. News & World Report published its 2027 Best Colleges rankings. For the first time since the 2012 edition, Princeton was not No. 1 among national universities. MIT was. Princeton came second and Harvard third.
One thing that clearly changed was the formula. U.S. News dropped a factor that measured how much federal student-loan debt graduates carried. In its place it put a new one : how much graduates earn four years after finishing, compared with others who studied the same subject, drawn from the Education Department's College Scorecard data. The new factor is worth 5 percent of a school's score.
Princeton has long met students' financial need with grants instead of loans, so it was hard to beat on debt. Eric Brooks, the U.S. News director of education data analysis, told Princeton's alumni magazine that Princeton's underlying data "netted out about the same." He also said Princeton's lead over other universities had been narrowing for several editions, since U.S. News added measures of faculty research. U.S. News pointed to MIT's strong marks on faculty research, test scores and graduates' earnings. The scale the two schools were weighed on moved, but that is not the whole story : the published accounts do not say how much of the swap at the top came from the new earnings factor and how much from a gap that was already closing.
How hard a college is to get into counts for nothing
Ask most people what makes a top college and they will say it is hard to get into. The ranking does not measure that. U.S. News removed acceptance rate from its formula in the 2019 edition, published in September 2018. By then it was worth just 1.25 percent. U.S. News still publishes a separate list of the schools with the lowest acceptance rates, but that list feeds nothing into the main ranking.
The closest thing left is test scores : the SAT and ACT results of entering students, worth 5 percent for national universities. High school class rank and the share of alumni who donate money were both once part of the formula. Both were dropped in the 2024 edition.
- What's new in the 2019 U.S. News Best Colleges rankings (via Yahoo)
- U.S. News & World Report announces 2019 Best Colleges rankings (PR Newswire)
- U.S. News Best Colleges ranking 2027 : MIT ends Princeton's long run at the top (Poets&Quants)
- Key changes in how the 2024 Best Colleges rankings were calculated (U.S. News)
More than half the score is what happens after students arrive
For national universities, 52 percent of the score is what U.S. News calls student outcomes. The largest piece is the share of students who graduate, worth 16 percent. Another 10 percent compares that graduation rate with the rate U.S. News predicts for a school given the students it admits, so a school that graduates more students than expected gains. Whether first-year students come back for a second year is worth 5 percent.
Eleven percent goes to students from low-income families, those who receive Pell Grants, the main federal grant for low-income undergraduates. Two measures, worth 5.5 percent each, count how many of them graduate and how their graduation rate compares with everyone else's. The last 10 percent is about money after college : 5 percent for the share of graduates who earn more than a typical high school graduate, and 5 percent for the new earnings-by-major factor.
U.S. News also publishes a separate social mobility list built from the Pell measures. It is a different list from the main ranking and does not replace it.
A fifth of the score is college leaders rating their rivals
Outside student outcomes, the largest factor is a survey. U.S. News sends a questionnaire to the president, the provost (the chief academic officer) and the dean of admissions at each school. Each is asked to rate the academic quality of schools in the same category, on a scale of 1 to 5, and only the schools they know. The average rating is worth 20 percent of the score.
According to the U.S. News methodology document for the 2027 edition, the survey went to 4,405 people and 30.8 percent answered. Among national universities the response rate was 41 percent. U.S. News says the survey captures qualities that are hard to measure otherwise, such as teaching and institutional health. Critics in the higher education press have argued for years that it mostly measures reputation.
Where the numbers come from
The figures behind the formula come from two places. Some come from a statistical survey U.S. News sends to each school, which the school fills in about itself. Others come from the federal government. These include graduation data that schools must report to the Department of Education, and earnings data from the College Scorecard, the department's public database of college costs and outcomes.
The balance has shifted toward federal data. In the 2024 edition U.S. News removed five factors, together worth 18 percent, including class size, alumni giving and the share of faculty with the highest degree in their field. Another was the share of graduates who borrowed federal loans, a different measure from the debt factor replaced in 2027. U.S. News said it was replacing measures that schools did not all report. For the 2027 edition, U.S. News reports that 73 percent of ranked schools sent in the statistical survey, down from 79 percent the year before, and that 99 of the top 100 national universities sent it in.
What happened when Columbia's own numbers were wrong
Numbers a school reports about itself are only as good as the school's reporting. In 2022 Columbia was ranked No. 2. That year Michael Thaddeus, a Columbia mathematics professor, published an analysis questioning the data behind the rank. Among other things, he questioned a claim that 83 percent of Columbia's classes had fewer than 20 students.
In September 2022 Columbia acknowledged problems with two figures, class size and the share of faculty with the highest degree in their field, saying it had relied on "outdated and/or incorrect methodologies." That acknowledgment covered those two figures, not everything the professor had questioned. Columbia did not send a new survey, and U.S. News placed it at No. 18 that month. In 2025 Columbia agreed to pay $9 million to settle a class action brought by students over the data, while denying wrongdoing. U.S. News has said that Columbia has not addressed questions about three other figures, and that it will keep evaluating whether to include the school.
- Columbia statement on Common Data Set reporting
- An investigation of the facts behind Columbia's U.S. News ranking (Michael Thaddeus)
- Columbia U.S. News ranking settlement (CNN)
- Columbia drops in U.S. News ranking (The Washington Post)
- U.S. News & World Report : Columbia falls (Deseret News)
- U.S. News will continue to evaluate Columbia University's inclusion
Refusing to take part does not take a college off the list
On November 16, 2022, Yale Law School said it would stop sending data to U.S. News, and Harvard Law School followed hours later. Stanford, Columbia, Berkeley, Georgetown and others joined. U.S. News answered that it would keep ranking every accredited law school using data the American Bar Association requires schools to publish. It also cut the weight of its reputation survey for law schools, which had been 40 percent. Yale had held or shared No. 1 since U.S. News began ranking law schools in 1990. It kept appearing in the rankings, and in the 2026 law rankings Stanford was first on its own, with Yale tied for second.
Columbia's undergraduate schools stopped taking part in June 2023. U.S. News ranks Columbia anyway from the figures the university reports to the federal government. In the 2027 edition it is listed tied for No. 12.
Medical schools went a different way. Harvard Medical School withdrew in January 2023, and Stanford, Johns Hopkins, Columbia and others followed. U.S. News then stopped giving medical schools numbered ranks and in its 2024 edition sorted them into four tiers. Schools that did not send data were listed as unranked in that edition. Whether leaving takes a school out depends on whether U.S. News can rebuild the school's numbers from public records.
- Yale and Harvard law schools withdraw from U.S. News rankings (The Washington Post)
- U.S. News reworks law school rankings, but Yale won't return (Higher Ed Dive)
- Harvard Law School ranking continues (The Harvard Crimson)
- Stanford overtakes Yale for top U.S. law school (Justia News)
- U.S. News revamps medical school rankings for 2024 (BestColleges)
- U.S. News releases medical school rankings (Becker's Hospital Review)
- Harvard Medical School withdraws from U.S. News rankings (Inside Higher Ed)
A rank is a set of choices about what counts
Put together, a U.S. News rank comes from more than a dozen measures, with weights that U.S. News chooses. The data comes partly from the schools and partly from the government, so schools shape the numbers too, by what they report and whether they report at all. The categories schools are compared within get redrawn as well. This year a national system for classifying colleges, the Carnegie Classification, was revised. About one in five previously ranked schools moved to a different ranking category as a result, and that alone can move a school's rank.
None of this makes the ranking meaningless. It does mean that when a school rises or falls, the questions worth asking are whether the school changed, whether the formula changed, and whether the group it is compared with changed. Often more than one did at once. At the very top this year, U.S. News's own data director pointed to the formula, while also describing a gap that had been closing for years.
