2022 Best Global Universities by City

[dimondpark]

The first US News ranking was based on a survey of university and college presidents. Here was the result of the first:

US News and World Report, 1983 Best Colleges Ranking
1 Stanford
2 Harvard
3 Yale
4 Princeton
5 UC Berkeley
6 U of Chicago
7 Michigan, Ann Arbor
8-tied Cornell
8-tied Illinois
10-tied Dartmouth
10-tied MIT
12 Cal Tech
13-tied Carnegie-Mellon
13-tied Wisconsin, Madison
15-tied Brown
15-tied Columbia
15-tied Indiana U.
15-tied-North Carolina, Chapel Hill
15-tied Rice

In 1988, US News published a top-25 list for the first time. It was again based simply on a survey of 1329 college presidents who chose the ten best colleges in their same Carnegie classification. There was a 60% response rate in 1988. In 1983 the response rate was 50%.

US News and World Report, Top 25 Universities, 1988
1 Stanford
2 Harvard
3 Yale
4 Princeton
5 UC Berkeley
6 Dartmouth
7 Duke
8 U of Chicago
9 Michigan, Ann Arbor
10 Brown
11 Cornell
12 MIT
13 North Carolina, Chapel Hill
14 Rice
15 Virginia
16 Johns Hopkins
17 Northwestern
18 Columbia
19 Pennsylvania
20 Illinois
21 Cal Tech
22 William and Mary
23-tied Wisconsin
23-tied Washington U St Louis
25-tied Emory
25-tied Texas

What happened?

In the beginning, US News' ranking was determined by a survey sent out to university presidents and they ranked the schools and then US News simply combined all those surveys and came up with the result.

Its amazing to see how highly thought of the elite public schools in the US are by college presidents.

Well, at the behest of Ivy League officials put out of sorts over the fact that so many public schools ranked so highly, US News changed the criteria and gave more weight to alumni giving rates, faculty-per-student ratio and per pupil spending and other things that would heavily sway the findings in favor of private schools.

That effectively and henceforth has shut out all public schools from the top 20.

Otherwise, Berkeley would still be 5th or so. And its easy to see how wrong the Undergrad ranking is just by looking at the Grad School rankings, where publics do STELLAR.