According to a new study from U.S. News & World Report, two Illinois universities are among the top 15 best colleges in the country. Additionally, several universities in Illinois and the Midwest are also ranked within the top 50. The study, titled “2024 Best Colleges,” evaluates 1,500 colleges based on 19 measures of academic quality. This year’s report focuses on the social mobility and achievement of graduating college students. The editors have made significant changes to the methodology, emphasizing schools’ ability to admit and graduate students from diverse backgrounds with manageable debt and post-graduation success. They have also removed several factors, including class size and alumni giving, from the rankings. Eric Gertler, Executive Chairman and CEO of News, stated that these changes aim to capture what matters most to students when comparing colleges.
The new rankings have resulted in several schools, such as Aurora University and Northern Illinois University, jumping higher in the overall rankings. However, neither of these schools made it to the top 100 national universities. Several schools in Illinois and the Midwest did make it into the top 50, including the University of Notre Dame (ranked 20th), the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (ranked 21st), the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (ranked 21st), and the University of Wisconsin-Madison (tied for 35th place). The University of Chicago came very close to the top, ranking at number 12, while Northwestern University in Evanston was ranked 9th, the only Illinois school in the report’s rankings for national liberal arts colleges. Other notable Midwest schools include Carleton University in Minnesota (ranked 11th), Grinnell College in Iowa, and Denison University in Ohio (ranked 39th).
The top 15 universities in the report’s “National Best University Rankings” are as follows:
1. Princeton University – Princeton, New Jersey
2. Massachusetts Institute of Technology – Cambridge, Massachusetts
3. Harvard University – Cambridge, Massachusetts
4. Stanford University – Stanford, California
5. Yale University – New Haven, Connecticut
6. University of Pennsylvania – Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
7. California Institute of Technology – Pasadena, California
8. Duke University – Durham, North Carolina
9. Brown University – Providence, Rhode Island
10. Johns Hopkins University – Baltimore, Maryland
11. Northwestern University – Evanston, Illinois
12. Columbia University – New York, NY
13. Cornell University – Ithaca, New York
14. University of Chicago – Chicago, Illinois (tie)
15. (Tied) University of California, Berkeley and University of California, Los Angeles
The full report and list of schools can be found on the U.S. News & World Report website.