University Rankings

Rankings are always fun, they generate lots of controversy, and sometimes they are even useful. Matt Briggs complied a set of college rankings that are all very different.

There is a set by the Wall Street Journal about which schools recruiters use to reliably fill certain positions. There are a lot of big state schools here, and a lot of technical schools. There is quite a bit of overlap with my own college rankings based on annualized rate of return.

Here is the WSJ list with my rankings in brackets. That that did not appear on my list have no entry in brackets.

1. Penn State
2. Texas A&M
3. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
4. Purdue
5. Arizona State University
6. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor [8]
7. Georgia Tech [1]
8. University of Maryland, College Park
9. University of Florida [10]
10. Carnegie Mellon
11. Brigham Young University [3]
12. Virginia Tech [9]
13. Cornell
14. UC Berkeley [6]
15. University of Wisconsin, Madison
16. UCLA [7]
17. Texas Tech
18. North Carolina State University, Raleign
19. University of Virginia [2]
20. Rutgers
21. Notre Dame
22. MIT
23. USC
24. Washington State University
25. University of North Carolina Chapel Hill [11]

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni rated schools purely on their classical educational competencies, the stuff of which a liberal education used to be composed: composition, literature, foreign language, history, economics, mathematics, science. We see at least three schools with Great Books curricula here, as well as two of the service academies. CCNY stands out because it generated an unusual number of Nobel Laurelates [8] in the Twentieth Century.

• Baylor University
• City University of New York - Brooklyn College
• East Tennessee State University
• Kennesaw State University
• Lamar University
• Midwestern State University
• St. John's College (MD)
• St. John's College (NM)
• Tennessee State University
• Texas A&M University - College Station
• Texas A&M University - Corpus Christi
• Thomas Aquinas College
• United States Air Force Academy
• United States Military Academy
• University of Arkansas - Fayetteville
• University of Dallas

The final list probably best represents the dominant point of view of the universities themselves, preeminence in research and reputation. It is disproportionately likely that your professors went to these schools, because having a degree from one of institutions places you at the head of the pack for academic positions.

1. University of Cambridge
2. Harvard University
3. Yale University
4. UCL (University College London)
5. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
6. University of Oxford
7. Imperial College London
8. University of Chicago
9. California Institute of Technology (Caltech)
10. Princeton University
11. Columbia University
12. University of Pennsylvania
13. Stanford University
14. Duke University
15. University of Michigan
16. Cornell University
17. Johns Hopkins University
18. ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology)
19. McGill University
20. Australian National University (ANU)
21. King's College London (KCL)
22. University of Edinburgh
23. University of Hong Kong (HKU)
24. University of Tokyo, The
25. Kyoto University