Harvard, Princeton Tie for #1 in US News Ranking

After pulling ahead of Princeton last year to claim the top spot on US News & World Report's list of "America's Best Colleges," Harvard has tied its Ivy League rival at number one on the 2010 list.

Yale took third place, with a four-way tie for fourth pitting the University of Pennsylvania and MIT against the California Institute of Technology and Stanford.

Director of Data Research Robert Morse said that while Harvard and Princeton tied overall, the scale tipped slightly in Harvard’s favor in individual category rankings. The report ranks such measures as financial aid, academic quality, student retention, faculty resources, and peer assessment.

“Harvard does have more number ones than Princeton but the data itself is very close,” Morse said.

According to Morse, Princeton’s rankings increased slightly this year in the peer assessment category, while Harvard had a slight decrease, of about 1 percent, in alumni donations.

After years of declining participation by universities in US News’ “peer reputation” surveys, response increased this year from 46 percent to 48 percent. Morse said that he believes the impact of the 2007 boycott on the peer reputation survey by advocacy group The Education Conservancy might be waning.

“Maybe the schools, given tough economic times, thought it was in their best interest to respond because they know we are going to do peer surveys anyway and fighting over a principle that the public doesn’t understand makes no sense for them as institutions,” Morse said.

In the peer assessment category, which contributes 25 percent of a college’s total score, a new question this year attempted to measure colleges’ commitment to undergraduate teaching by having university officials name schools that they believed exhibited an outstanding commitment specifically to undergraduate education. Dartmouth, Princeton, Yale, Stanford, and the University of Maryland Baltimore County were ranked best in this metric among Harvard's peer institutions, but Harvard did not receive the seven necessary votes to be ranked at all, according to Morse.

US News and World Report uses seven indicators to determine academic quality including peer assessment, retention, faculty resources, student selectivity, financial resources, graduation rate performance, and alumni giving rate. One factor that is not measured, Morse said, is what students learn. A recent survey by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, addressed this question by assessing colleges’ general education curriculums. Harvard received a letter grade of D, Princeton C, and Yale F, according to this assessment.

But Morse said that measuring core curriculum “in no way proves [students] are learning anything in classes or how engaged students are in schools.”

Faculty of Arts and Sciences spokesman Robert P. Mitchell said that while it is “always nice to be recognized” in US News and World Reports top rankings, “students should not select a college based on any rankings, students really need to think about what is best for their needs.”

--Staff writer Jillian K. Kushner can be reached at kushner@fas.harvard.edu.