The University of Pennsylvania dropped to 10th place in U.S. News & World Report’s annual rankings of national universities, its lowest ranking since 1997.
According to the preliminary top 10 rankings for 2024-25 obtained exclusively by The Daily Pennsylvanian, the University of Pennsylvania dropped four spots from last year’s list to No. 4 among Ivy League schools. Princeton University took the top spot, followed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology in second and Harvard University in third.
The official rankings will be published on the U.S. News website on Sept. 24. The University of Pennsylvania and the rest of the top 10 schools did not respond to requests for comment as of press time.
“US News provides preliminary information to each institution for its Best Colleges rankings,” a US News spokesperson wrote to DP. “The information provided is not considered final until or until the publication date, which this year is September 24th, on USNews.com.”
Until this year, the University of Pennsylvania had not ranked higher than ninth in the U.S. News rankings since 1997, when it was ranked 13th in the nation.
The results also show that the top three schools remained unchanged from last year’s rankings. Stanford University, which tied for third place in last year’s rankings, dropped to fourth place. Yale University maintained its fifth place position. The University of Pennsylvania saw the biggest drop in ranking from last year among all the top 10 schools.
Four universities are tied for sixth place, a spot held by the University of Pennsylvania in last year’s 2023-24 rankings. California Institute of Technology and Duke University moved up from a tie for seventh place, while Johns Hopkins University and Northwestern University moved up from a tie for ninth place to a tie for sixth place. Brown University, which was also ranked ninth last year, dropped out of the top 10.
The University of Pennsylvania’s No. 10 ranking is its lowest ranking in U.S. News since 1997.
According to a U.S. News article, this year’s ranking methodology removes the graduation rates of first-generation students from public universities and historically black colleges and universities from the calculation, instead using Pell Grant graduation rates. The rankings still take into account student retention rates, graduate debt, and post-graduation earnings.
About two-thirds of the universities surveyed, including nearly all of the top 100 national universities, submitted their own data for the rankings.
Last year, DP reported that, according to several higher education experts, the University of Pennsylvania likely inaccurately stated the student-to-faculty ratio metric it used in its U.S. News rankings. The experts spoke to DP about the inconsistent underlying metric that the University of Pennsylvania has reported for its student-to-faculty ratio for more than 15 years and what it means for the university’s U.S. News rankings.
It remains unclear what figures caused the change in the university’s ranking between this year and last year.
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