U.S. News & World Report Announces the 2021 Best Colleges Rankings

My post above mentioned that Stanford was #1 in the initial rankings based on college president survey, then Yale was #1 in the first ranking with weightings, then Harvard was #1 for several years after the rankings were tweaked. Princeton was first ranked #1 later… in 1998 and has been regularly been ranked #1 since then.

I believe one of HYP have always been ranked #1 in every year since they started using weightings, except for 2000. In 2000, USNWR standardized their variables, which led to Caltech jumping to #1, ahead of HYP in #2 to #4. After much criticism from confused readers, USNWR modified their expenditure per student formula in a way that disadvantaged Caltech and applied an adjustor on statistical outliers, like Caltech .This returned HYP to #1 to #3 in the following year, above Caltech at #4.