In the last few years national and regional university rankings have become more prominent as interest in global rankings has receded. It is likely that there will be more national rankings if international student mobility continues to decline.
The Wall Street Journal has just published the 2024 edition of the Best Colleges in the USA. This year the partners are College Pulse and Statista. It seems that the partnership with Times Higher Education to produce a US ranking has ended.
The current ranking emphasises those indicators likely to be of importance to undergraduates. There are twelve relating to salary, debt, graduation rates, student perceptions of the learning environment, costs, value added, and international, ethnic, social, and disability diversity.
The top of the ranking looks quite familiar, with Princeton in first place, followed by MIT, Yale, Stanford, Columbia, and Harvard. A bit further down, however, there are a number of technology schools and private liberal arts colleges that have not been rated highly in previous rankings: Amherst College, Claremont Mc Kenna College, Babson College, the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, and the New Jersey Institute of Technology.
It is also noticeable that the elite institutions of the University of California system have not performed well. Berkeley is 51st, UCLA 74th and San Diego 103rd.
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