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Princeton Tops Best Colleges List for 19th Year, While Other Ivies Fall Behind

The term “Ivy League” is generally associated with some of the best of the best when it comes to a college education, but that could be changing. USA TODAY reports that the U.S. News World & Report’s Best College rankings of 2017, a list that has been compiled annually since 1983 and ranks schools on various criteria, including freshmen retention, expert opinion, faculty resources, student excellence, financial resources and alumni giving, shows a number of Ivies have dropped in the ranks, being surpassed by non-Ivies.


Princeton (for the 19th year in a row) and Harvard clinched the first two spots, while the University of Chicago climbed to tie Yale for third place, knocking Stanford and Columbia down to tie for fifth. Massachusetts Institute of Technology came in at sixth, with Duke University (N.C.) and the University of Pennsylvania tying for eighth place. The full list can be seen at U.S. News, and the schools included offer a “full range of undergraduate majors, plus master’s and doctoral programs,” and are committed to “producing groundbreaking research.”

You can find all of the U.S. News & World Report 2017 rankings here, including Best Value Schools and Top Public Schools, which are just a few of nearly 50 different lists compiled to help college-bound students narrow down their choice of schools.

Sammi is the Lifestyle Editor at HerCampus.com, assisting with content strategy across sections. She's been a member of Her Campus since her Social Media Manager and Senior Editor days at Her Campus at Siena, where she graduated with a degree in Biology of all things. She moonlights as an EMT, and in her free time, she can be found playing post-apocalyptic video games, organizing her unreasonably large lipstick collection, learning "All Too Well (10 Minute Version) (Taylor's Version) (From The Vault)" on her guitar, or planning her next trip to Broadway.