Northwestern retained the No. 9 spot in U.S. News & World Report’s annual National Universities rankings after dropping to 10th last year. NU previously ranked ninth three years in a row.
The University tied with Brown University and Johns Hopkins University, coming in above Columbia University which snagged the No. 12 spot, U.S. News announced Monday. The Kellogg School of Business ranked second among business schools, and the School of Education and Social Policy ranked third among education schools.
Across U.S. News’ other rankings for 2023-2024, the University dropped two spots to 15th in the Best Value Schools ranking, which takes into account academic quality and cost of attendance. It also ranked 261st in social mobility, climbing up from the 303rd spot last year.
U.S. News also ranked NU 13th for best undergraduate engineering programs — a three-spot jump from the previous list — and 10th for best undergraduate economics programs.
U.S. News altered this year’s ranking formula in response to criticism of its methodology after misrepresentation of data by schools like Columbia. NU’s Pritzker School of Law, along with several other prestigious law schools, opted out of the organization’s law school rankings last year.
The new formula weighs graduation rates for first-generation college students and those who received Pell grants for the first time. It also eliminates five long-standing factors previously used to evaluate colleges and universities, including class size and alumni giving rate.
Still, the results in the upper echelons of the ranking did not change significantly. Princeton University scored the top spot on the list for the 13th consecutive year. The top five universities — Princeton, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, Stanford University and Yale University — remained unchanged, although Yale dropped from No. 3 to No. 5 this year.
The University of Chicago dropped from 6th to 12th on the list, however, making NU the top-ranked university in Illinois for the first time since 2006.
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