2017 US News College Rankings

The 2017 “US News” college rankings are out.

The 2017 “US News & World Report” college rankings are out. In the world of highly selective college admissions, this is always an event worthy of a calendar notation because the “US News” rankings matter quite a bit. To colleges. To parents. To students. To alligators. Ok, maybe not to alligators. We were being a bit silly there. Roll with it.

So which university topped the 2017 “US News & World Report” ranking for best national universities? That would be Princeton University. And, yes, it was Princeton that earned the top spot in 2016 too. If you’re curious which university earned the top spot in 2015, it was also Princeton. And 2014? Princeton. Are you starting to get the idea with respect to Princeton University’s stronghold on the top spot in the all-important “US News” rankings? We hope so.

Princeton University topping the “US News & World Report” ranking has become somewhat of an annual tradition. Congratulations, Princeton!

Anyhow, for the 2017 “US News” ranking, Harvard University took the runner-up slot with the University of Chicago placing third in a tie with Yale University. In fifth came Columbia University and Stanford University. In seventh came the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Duke University and the University of Pennsylvania tied for eighth. Johns Hopkins University landed the tenth slot. Dartmouth College placed eleventh, bettering its ranking from a year ago. The California Institute of Technology placed twelfth with Northwestern University. Brown University took fourteenth. Then came Cornell University, Rice University, University of Notre Dame, and Vanderbilt University in a four-way tie for fifteenth. Washington University in St. Louis placed nineteenth. Emory University, Georgetown University, and the University of California – Berkeley rounded out the top twenty in a three-way tie.

So there are cheers at the University of Chicago for sure, with the school climbing up from a three-way tie for fourth in the 2016 “US News” ranking into a two-way tie for third. UPenn climbed a notch to tie Duke for the eighth slot this year. And there are cheers at Johns Hopkins this year, too, with the school climbing into the top ten, pushing out the California Institute of Technology, a school that has historically topped this very ranking more than once.