For 15 straight years, Princeton University sat atop the U.S. News & World Report ranking of America’s best universities. Williams College has enjoyed an even longer reign, topping the liberal arts ranking for 24 consecutive years.

But all good things must come to an end. This year, MIT finally supplanted Princeton at No. 1. It’s not quite the underdog New York Knicks ending a 53-year championship drought, but in the peculiar world of college rankings, it’s seismic.

MIT had ranked No. 2 for five straight years, always the bridesmaid and never the bride. So what finally put a ring on it? The answer likely lies inside the U.S. News algorithm itself.

Malcolm Gladwell devoted a couple of episodes of his Revisionist History podcast to trying to reverse-engineer U.S. News’ “secret formula.” His larger point was delicious. For all the mathematical precision rankings project, the algorithm is inherently subjective, built by humans who decide which inputs belong in the formula, which don’t and how much weight each should carry.

MIT didn’t suddenly become a better university this year. Nor did Princeton suddenly become worse. The ruler changed. And one announced change in particular stands out: Earnings by Major.

This year, U.S. News is incorporating federal College Scorecard data measuring earnings four years after graduation among employed bachelor’s degree recipients who received federal financial aid. The measure replaces Graduate Indebtedness, shifting part of the rankings equation from how much graduates owe to how much they earn.

Importantly, graduates are compared within fields of study, reducing the advantage a university might otherwise receive simply because it produces lots of engineers rather than anthropologists or theater majors.

But MIT doesn’t merely produce lots of engineers and computer scientists. Its graduates compete for some of the most coveted jobs in technology, finance, research and artificial intelligence, including at companies like OpenAI and Anthropic.

U.S. News has disclosed only some of this year’s methodology changes. At present, few outside the organization can say precisely what propelled MIT past Princeton. But when a university spends five straight years at No. 2, U.S. News introduces an earnings measure and that university suddenly becomes No. 1, the timing is hard to ignore.

Of course, criticizing U.S. News is practically a sport, and much of that criticism is well deserved. Rankings are imperfect. Some universities have historically gamed them masterfully (Northeastern University comes to mind), while extraordinary institutions like Tufts University have sometimes underperformed relative to their reputations.

Yet U.S. News remains the king of college rankings. Every other ranking is just trying to capture some of U.S. News’ magic.

When I served as an admissions officer at my alma mater, Washington University in St. Louis, we rarely discussed the U.S. News ranking overtly in admissions meetings. But we knew it mattered. Every highly selective university wants to rank well. University leaders know applicants, parents, alumni, donors and trustees are watching closely.

Colleges love to say rankings don’t matter. They tend to say it loudest when they fall. Which brings me to the more interesting story behind this year’s methodology: money.

It’s become fashionable to declare that college isn’t worth it. As a senior admissions consultant at Ivy Coach, I’ll say something that might surprise people. Sometimes, it isn’t.

America has more than a thousand colleges, and not every degree is worth today’s extraordinary tuition. But lumping MIT, Princeton, Harvard, Stanford, Williams and their highly selective peers into a generic debate over whether “college is worth it” misses the point entirely.

Look at earnings four years after graduation. Look again 10 years later. Look at who gets recruited by the world’s most selective employers. Look at the pipelines into medicine, law, finance, technology, academia, entrepreneurship and corporate leadership.

Yes, elite universities begin with extraordinary students, so separating the value of the institution from the talent it admits is difficult. But that doesn’t make the outcomes irrelevant.

And now U.S. News itself is following the money. At the very moment it’s in vogue for families to question whether colleges can justify tuition approaching $100,000 a year, America’s most influential college ranking has begun explicitly measuring what graduates earn.

For generations, families asked, “How hard is this college to get into?” Increasingly, they’re asking, “What happens after you get out?”

U.S. News needs its ranking to answer the questions families are asking now because, for millions of Americans, the rankings aren’t merely one part of the U.S. News brand. They are the U.S. News brand. They are the reason the publication has been in business all these years.

So the algorithm has to evolve to keep the rankings relevant. This year, it did. And after five years of knocking on the door, MIT finally walked through it. The ruler changed. So did the king.

Charis Ralko is a senior admissions consultant at Ivy Coach and served as an associate director of admissions at Washington University in St. Louis.