The latest U.S. News & World Report college rankings came out this week. The main rankings held few surprises with Harvard and Princeton tied for best National Universities, Williams as the best liberal arts college, and Berkeley as the best public university. U.S. News & World Report is often criticized for their methodology which places a lot of weight on a school's national reputation (see the College Admissions forum for a discussion of a very different methodology used by Forbes). U.S. News keeps adding rankings of new categories to try and quell the claims that they are rewarding nothing but prestige.
New this year is a list of "best undergraduate teaching." Here again, however, name recognition and highly selective admissions seems to trump what might actually be going on in the classroom. Pomona tops the list for liberal arts colleges, and Dartmouth wins for National Universities. It's in "up-and-coming" colleges where you'll actually see something other than the usual suspects. The top up-and-coming liberal arts college is Hendrix, an Arkansas college I included in my 2008 spotlights of hidden gems -- great schools that might be off an applicant's radar.
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