Stanford at #3 in 2024 best college rankings from US News; UC Berkeley top public school
Stanford University is ranked among the top universities in the nation in the latest college rankings from US News & World Report, with Bay Area rival University of California, Berkeley ranked again as the No. 1 public school in the country.
The annual ranking of the nation's top colleges shows Princeton University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ranked No. 1 and No. 2, respectively, with Stanford and Harvard tied at No. 3 in the 2024 list of best national universities.
Other California schools ranked among the top of the best national universities include the California Institute of Technology at No. 7 and UC Berkeley and UCLA tied at No. 15
For the 10th straight year, UC Berkeley also ranked at the top of the list of best public universities, tying the top spot with UCLA. US News has also named Cal as the top public university in the world in annual rankings that will be issued later in the fall.
California schools were well-represented among this year's best national universities, with UC Davis, UC San Diego, USC, UC Irvine, UC Santa Barbara, Santa Clara University, UC Merced, Pepperdine University, UC Riverside, UC Santa Cruz, Loyola Marymount University, and the University of San Diego all landing in the top 100.
US News ranked 1,600 colleges on criteria such as graduation and retention rates, financial resources, first-generation graduation rates, student-faculty ratio, faculty resources and class size.
The annual rankings have drawn criticism for being seen as engines that reinforce income inequality and status, with critics arguing that such lists help neither students nor their families and may obscure better ways of judging the quality of higher education.
The increasing chorus from those opposed to such rankings has also led to changes in the methodology used by US News to come up with its lists, with a greater focus placed on outcomes and using data obtained from third-party sources. Factors removed from the methodology include class size, alumni giving, the proportion of graduates with federal loans, and the number of professors with terminal degrees - the highest degrees in a chosen field.