US News Top 20 Colleges for 2022

LOL, "Yale" not "Yake"

Columbia cheated.

The next 10 are:

21. Emory

22. Cal Berkeley

23. Georgetown (tie)

23. Michigan (tie)

25. Carnegie Mellon (tie)

25. Virginia (tie)

27. USC (Southern California)

28. NYU (tie)

28. Tufts (tie)

28. UC Santa Barbara (tie)

28. U Florida (tie)

28. UNC (tie)

28. Wake Forest (tie)

Two of the three schools that I have degrees from made the list! Woo-hoo!

Top 10 SLACs:

1. Williams

2. Amherst

3. Swarthmore

4. Pomona

5. Wellesley

6. Bowdoin (tie)

7. Annapolis (USNA) (tie)

8. Claremont McKenna

9. Carleton (tie)

9. Middlebury (tie)

Hudson University is number one in homicide!

Thank god my 2 "lesser" ivies still make the list. This sis VERY IMPORTANT TO ME as I pass 60 years old.

UC Santa Barbara is #28??

WTF?

It's a total nothing school, full of loafers.

That list is a joke.

Did Bay City Community College make the list?

I've never even heard of the University of Chicago.

Middlebury on SLAC list is a joke.

U of Chicago was for a hundred years the school for egghead automaton grinds.

Proof Columbia cheated, by a Columbia Professor.

Shouldn't it be Colombia University?

My SO is faculty at a top medical school. One year it scandalously placed slightly lower than usual when a key staffer was on sick leave. He provides some of the info that's used when rankings are formulated. Many jokes are still made about what his secret duties must entail since order was restored as soon as he recovered.

Biggest surprise seems to be the rise of Northwestern, Vanderbilt and WashU, which have always been good schools, to a place where they are on par or above the "lesser" Ivies.

Thought this seems to be on track with what I hear from friends/family, that Ivy League admissions have gotten so skewed that the upper middle class suburban white kids who used to go to Penn and Cornell now wind up at those three schools, which then attracts the attention of the sort of companies that traditionally employ those sorts of kids.

And of course for Californians, UCLA beating out Cal is a huge deal. The deal there seems to be that Cal's dorms and other facilities are outdated while UCLA has been upgrading theirs and word got out. (Plus there's that whole lawsuit about Cal admitting too many students)

Of course this list especially is "gamed" by colleges and universities - especially private Universities. I think USC has a staff position that was something "Director of Getting Us Higher on Lists" Vanderbilt and others work really hard on these lists... it's part of their business model.

One part of the "methodology" is to get subject area "experts" to rate departments. I.e. a biologist ranking Biology Departments. R8 that's one reason UCSB does so well on these lists now. Science and literature departments at UCSB have risen in status so much in the last couple decades.

R16 UCLA has ranked ahead of Berkeley for a while now. Highest ranked public university on the list. Has the most applications of any university of the country.

While the lists are pretty silly... I do think the fact that "the Ivies" are no longer in sole position of the top spots is reflective of what's happening. But again... it's all like "Car of the Year" BS

And really, the rankings are all about giving the school a reason to charge a higher tuition.

We're #1. And you're going to have to pay big bucks to attend.

[quote]I've never even heard of the University of Chicago.

I wouldn't announce that.

Question for the group: Of those of you who attended college, how important to your eventual life and career was your choice of schools?

In my case, college gave me and strengthened certain skill sets, fostered maturity and independence, introduced me to a much broader range of people and cultures than I had been previously been exposed to, and opened a whole new world of sex, drugs and rock & roll. (Yes, I'm a baby boomer.)

While the school I selected did have a very good program in the area I was interested in (and which became my career), the bigger impact on me came from going to a major state school after a relatively sheltered upbringing. It was literally life-changing and I never went back home or to the life I had before college. In hindsight, I believe I could have gotten the same life experience at almost any large school. It was less about my area of study and more about growing up and finding myself.

R19 No kidding. UofC department of economics basically invented our Western economic models. Showing how nuts these various lists are... UofC is #10 on this "international list"... and Princeton, #1 on the US New list doesn't even break the top 10.

So many changes on these lists and yet Princeton has stayed in that number 1 spot for what, 40 years?

You are not incorrect R21, but the US News list seems to occupy an unwarranted place of prominence among high school students and their parents. Employers too.

OTOH, R21, your list has Penn well above Yale.

Two of its six criteria are "International Faculty Ratio and International Student Ratio" - so Chicago may be highly ranked by dint of having a large number of foreign students, most of whom come of China these days.

R20 I spent a miserable freshman year at Harvard. Dreary place, awful weather and unattractive people, especially the cool arty crowd at Adams House. Spring break I made my way to Berkeley and asked them to let me in (I had been accepted for freshman year). A year later I was on the beautiful Berkeley campus, and had the best years of my life.

Leaving Harvard had no effect on my career path. From Berkeley I went to UCLA for medical school (acceptance rate is 4%) where I got a top rate education and training for 1/3 the price of other top ranked med schools. I also did residency at UCLA.

R25, you type cute

R23 Well, USN was the first to do this with some national presence. I think in recent years Forbes has also been followed with "a more accurate" methodology that can't be as easily gamed. It's all relatively silly though.....

I just don’t and never will understand the Duke and Vanderbilt thing?

Great story R25. Your quality of life improved by switching schools and you still got an excellent education in your chosen field.

I thought Berkeley was in the midst of Oakland, one of the worst urban wastelands, or at least that’s how it’s usually presented?

1. Berkeley is a separate city and fairly upscale these days.

2. So is Oakland which has been massively gentrified in many parts. Oakland:San Francisco = Brooklyn:Manhattan

When was Oakland incorporated into the city of San Francisco?

On another site I would think R32 was an attempt at humor.

At Aspilounge, it is just a statement.

Lincoln Land Community College in Springfield IL isn’t on the list?!

These lists are crap anyway. You can't really say that Harvard or Stanford or Princeton is better or worse than the other. Nor can you say that you'd get a better education at one of them than you would at a so-called lesser school like Tufts or Lehigh.

I went to Stanford and really disliked it: too many entitled, overprivileged kids not terribly interested in their studies, far more interested in their social life and, more so, their eventual careers that would make them money. I wish I had gone to a place like Bard or Vermont or another school with more interesting, less determined-to-become-a-doctor-or-a-hedge-fund manager types.

R10:

University Of Florida needs to be higher

[quote] I've never even heard of the University of Chicago.

LMAO - I thought we had smarter posters than this. U of Chicago is actually legendary.

R25, of course your choice of schools didn't really matter. You're a fucking DOCTOR. And not some stupid PhD in Education.

Actually R25 my education is very important and has helped me get jobs. I have a degree from one of the best medical schools in the country (GO BRUINS) and residency as well, this matters quite a bit.

Medical schools often are ranked on how many pass USLME Step 1 and match successfully. UCLA has a very high passing rate, because it is academically rigorous and you are taught by top doctors doing research in the areas you study. If you do not go to a good school, you will not get a residency at top schools (for example, my program had zero DOs and zero FMGs (foreign medical grads) They only accepted folks from UC schools or top schools. Period.

^ Meant for R38.

[quote]These lists are crap anyway. You can't really say that Harvard or Stanford or Princeton is better or worse than the other. Nor can you say that you'd get a better education at one of them than you would at a so-called lesser school like Tufts or Lehigh.

A Stanford graduate

[quote]These lists are crap anyway. You can't really say that Harvard or Stanford or Princeton is better or worse than the other. Nor can you say that you'd get a better education at one of them than you would at a so-called lesser school like Tufts or Lehigh.

A Harvard graduate

don't be a smart ass.

Where are the colored colleges on the list?

How the fuck did John's Hopkins rise so high? Back in my days, Cornell and JHU'S rankings were reversed.

Separate 😉 list, Mames (R44). You only have to remember three: Howard, Morehouse, and Spelman.

R38 I know, right! One of our finest minds of the 20th century attended University of Chicago after ditching Berkeley for being quite backward.

R45 The medical school carries that university on its back.

r5 Wow. When I was also considering SLACs in the 2000s, these two (4. Pomona 8. Claremont McKenna) were nowhere near top 10 (and maybe top 20 even).

There's Harvard then all the rest. Period. Yes, schools like Princeton and Yale are equally prestigious and may even be better schools, but for most people, Harvard is the star.

Just read philosophy at Ludwig-Maximilians in Munich and call it done. Maybe pick-up an Oxbridge diploma. Hire a clever Algerian to manage your households.

Where’s UFL ?

R49 Pomona and CMC were always in the top ten of SLACs even back when I was a teen applying to college in the 90s. They were the only ones on the West Coast that were noteworthy.

The Claremont colleges’ rise over the past 20 years is interesting. We had an exchange program with them in the 80s and as much as I wanted to spend a year in SoCal, the reputation was so non-existent I was afraid of appearing as if I had slacked off for a year. I regret it now - my one chance to live in CA was lost. Glad to see them doing well - seems like it would be a good undergrad experience. As much as I liked my Northeast SLAC, getting to live in CA is an awesome perk.

At this point, I'm more impressed hearing a kid got into Univ. of Chicago than Harvard.

Caltech should be higher

r53 Ah sorry, I admit I don't remember college admission stuff much now.

I bought a t shirt that said “HARVARD—The University of Chicago of the East”

I don't think Berkeley, the campus or town, is at all beautiful. The campus has no impressive buildings imo. As far as the rankings, Berkeley was higher when I went there but I was unimpressed. Huge classes, snotty teaching assistants who did the actual grading, invisible advisors, truly pathetic social scene...I couldn't wait to graduate.

The town is congested, dirty, and crime-ridden. A friend of mine still lives there in a nice area in the hills. She left her garage door open while she ran back upstairs to get something and her backpack was snatched out of the car--she was gone 5 minutes. I went to Whole Foods downtown and two tweakers were fucking in their beater car with all the doors open in the parking lot. Some college kids were on a balcony when the thing collapsed and killed them all. Investigation showed the contractors cut corners and the Management company ignored complaints.

What a dump.

Berkeley is a dump and for a "grand school" the infrastructure is woefully inadequate. California underfunded it for decades.

Harvard has four prestige advantages over its rivals:

1) Being the oldest

2) Location, Location, Location

3) Huge professional graduate schools

4) Self-perpetuation of the status as “the best” in the public imagination

(In Vino) Veritas.

The Claremont schools benefited from the nationalization of college admissions -- more kids applying to schools outside their home regions in the hope that would give them an edge/make them unique. They've always been good schools, but they got the attention of East Coast and Midwestern kids now too.

Absolutely CalTech should be rated higher.

And in MY day, Johns Hopkins was certainly considered better than Cornell. Cornell was/is a great school, but it was never any better than Syracuse.

Syracuse on par with Cornell? Dream on.

[quote] And in MY day,

Given that this is Datalounge. R64 could be referring to 1922

R61 so why has Princeton been number one on this list seemingly forever?

Harvard has a huge endowment and a network like nobody's business, so it's not just its age and reputation. The school can basically buy any faculty it wants. Columbia is also very rich (Manhattan real estate--it owns land all over Manhattan, not just the campus.)

Northwestern, Duke and Johns Hopkins have been sharing the bottom of the top 10 for a while now. Northwestern is a solid all-around school that's climbed the ranks by focusing on popular, but slightly non-traditional majors and grad schools--strong in communications, theater as well as medical schools, music, engineering. It's also the one private elite school in the Big Ten. It plays the game by making double majoring easy (appealing to theater kids whose parents actually want them to get jobs after school). It also really works the early-decision game--the legacies/athletic recruits get in then when the school admits 25 percent, then pulls up its stats by being super picky during the general admissions process.

Duke is the elite school of the South, followed by Vanderbilt, Emory, Rice. As the South rises in population and wealth, so do the schools there. Rice has focused heavily on admitting kids with high test scores/grades, but I think it doesn't have as high a yield rate--less than half the students admitted accept, whereas 80-85 percent of the kids admitted to Harvard, Yale or Princeton accept.

I honestly don't know why Washington U has climbed so much. It was just kind of a large, average school when I was applying back in the dark ages.

R31, do you mean that all the black people moved out of Oakland?

They moved because there was no there there.

--G. Stein

R69 Oakland today is 34% White, 24% Black, 30% "other race" (chinese, middle eastern, vietnamese etc.). 10-15 years ago the white/black proportion would have been reversed.

I think Oakland has (had? Covid?) more really good restaurants than SF.

As a proud Yake graduate, I am appalled.

Ypir's kids are at Brown.

[quote] I honestly don't know why Washington U has climbed so much. It was just kind of a large, average school when I was applying back in the dark ages.

Back in the 1950s, Washington University was basically a commuter school on a pretty campus adjacent to one of the country’s premier urban parks.

But ever since they have been ratcheting up the test scores and rankings by funding more National Merit Scholars and investing heavily in professors and infrastructure.

The medical school is always top 5 but lately the law school has climbed into the top 25.

Good sized endowment = lots of financial aid and scholarships.

In response to R25:

My SLAC and graduate university are in this year’s top five. The former gave me a great education and helped get me into the latter. The latter’s has been an invaluable boost to my career.

A few years ago both schools were in the top 3. So, either they’re declining

I expect Florida is benefiting from the big surge in population down there--more demand, lower acceptance rate, more prestige, more money, easier faculty recruitment. Average cost after aid is less than $7,000 per year--that's going to be a big draw. The beach and party scene would be a big draw. I know a kid who got into Northwestern and went to the University of Miami. He wanted to have fun. It was sort of funny as the parents had used a very expensive college counselor to get him into a top school.

That makes sense on paper R68 but another big factor is that schools like Duke and Vanderbilt all started recruiting really hard at the top private and suburban public schools in the Northeast and taking as many as a half dozen kids from each school.

Vanderbilt promoted their Hillel hard (organization for Jewish students similar to Newman House for Catholics), WashU and Northwestern already had large Jewish populations and used alumni in the Northeast to help with recruiting.

Those schools were also fortunate in that Penn and the other Ivies all got very "Noah's Ark" with admissions and so Penn was not taking a dozen kids from Horace Mann and Scarsdale every year which meant those kids all wound up at Duke, Vanderbilt, Northwesterm and WashU ,with Emory and Tulane right behind.

The weather played a role in recruiting kids from the Northeast to Southern schools. Rather than spend a winter in Ithaca or northern New England, they could be in a place where it rarely snowed.

Wake Forest, Richmond and Elon are using that playbook now and heavily recruiting throughout the Northeast--appears to be working as Wake is now top 30.

R77 but Duke’s been as good as Penn (and arguably better than Cornell) for at least 30 years.

Also a school like Emory #21 Vs Georgetown #23…I can tell you that no one I know who ever went to Emory got accepted at Georgetown. A lot of this list is bullshit.

My kid’s going to state school.

A nurse told me he graduated from university of Alabama, a top 5 public school. Top 5 where? Tuscaloosa?

Isn’t Duke literally named after the robber baron tobacco magnate who basically invented the modern cigarette and who’s family enslaved people? With that heavy history, which they obviously choose to embrace, I don’t understand how they ever can be considered a top tear university? The racism embodied in that school must be so deeply rooted nothing could ever repair or dislodge them from that.

What is r81 on about?

The Oh Dear Troll is going to just stomp all over R81

Almost every Ivy League school investigated their own histories and found DEEP connections to wealth built on slaves. And these are Northern universities.

The issue is that these histories are GREY - full of nuance, and nowadays everyone wants RIGHT AND WRONG, GOOD AND EVIL binaries.

[quote]A nurse told me he graduated from university of Alabama, a top 5 public school. Top 5 where? Tuscaloosa?

I wouldn't even call it top 5 within its very location.

[quote] These lists are crap anyway. You can't really say that Harvard or Stanford or Princeton is better or worse than the other.

Yes, you can. Princeton has the atmosphere and feel of a liberal arts college with the resources of Yale and Harvard.

[quote] And of course for Californians, UCLA beating out Cal is a huge deal.

In my era, this used to be a constant battle between Berkeley, Virginia, and Michigan. I was surprised to see UCLA!

R88 UVA is still the best of the state schools.

[quote] Question for the group: Of those of you who attended college, how important to your eventual life and career was your choice of schools?

I was a coddled, naive, unformed kid when I went off to college, because I was lucky to be born into a comfortable suburban life that didn’t demand much of me. Because I went to a good school, my education was furthered a lot, often not due to effort on my part (again, lucky). So it was very important. I didn’t network at all or use college for that reason.

What I’ve learned since then is any hardworking and self-motivated student can excel and build a great life from almost ANY school. So, on one hand, it wouldn’t matter so much. But if a kid that strong wound up at Harvard, they would probably use that opportunity to really really excel in a way they couldn’t at Local Public University. So, on the other hand, it still matters.

If you just care that your kid winds up happy, then don’t worry so much. College is fun anywhere.

It really depends what you want to do or what you wind up doing.

If you want to work at a big consulting company or investment bank out of college, that's going to be much easier coming out of a top school.

If you want to be a sitcom writer, Harvard has a good line into that though Stanford doesn't.

If you want to be a lawyer, then where you go to law school matters far more than where you went to undergrad, etc

But plenty of people back into careers too-- you can go to community college, two years at a state school, get good grades, some good work experience and wind up at a top law school and a top law firm.

R88 Probably due to UCLA having a huge medical hospital/research complex, stretching many blocks now. UCLA has a lot more research dollars.

BA Berkeley MD UCLA

I went to both Northwestern (which clearly is above Duke and Johns Hopkins) and Columbia (which is clearly below Harvard).

Rankings are based on the undergrad school, not grad schools

[quote]But plenty of people back into careers too-- you can go to community college, two years at a state school, get good grades, some good work experience and wind up at a top law school and a top law firm.

No you can't.

[quote] No you can't

Oh Datalounge. Where it will forever be 1987

R95, while that may be unlikely that's not impossible. Sometimes people are just very ambitious and very capable of persuading others.

A friend from a decent but not top tier law school didn't get hired at a big SF law firm (I think she had spent a summer with them) and she literally demanded another interview and talked her way in. She made partner maybe 8 years later. So never say never. Of course now that I think about it she had worked on the hill and maybe she used some of those connections to grease the way. But it just shows you have to use all the arrows in your quiver.

R81, Duke also has noteworthy architecture, including its chapel, by Julian Abele, a noteworthy African-American architect. Several older universities have links to slavery, including all of the Ivy League except for Cornell. Elihu Yale was a slave trader. The Brown family had both slave-owners and abolitionists. Georgetown stayed afloat at one point by selling slaves (it offers reparations via admissions and tuition to descendants of those slaves)

R77. Interesting. I'm in California--the Southern schools don't do much in the way of recruitment here, but the Midwestern ones do--both Northwestern and U. of Chicago like those top-scoring Asian-American students who didn't get into HPYSM.

R98 Duke literally copied its campus after Princeton. It wanted to be the Princeton of the South.

And I guess it is.