The results are in, and Penn has climbed higher than ever on the academic ladder.
Bolstered by top faculty resources, the University has jumped into fifth place in the latest U.S. News & World Report rankings, which were released last night.
Penn, which finished as the sixth-ranked school last year, now shares the number five spot with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University.
Princeton University leads the pack for the second straight year, with Harvard and Yale universities tied for second place. The California Institute of Technology finished fourth for the second year in a row.
Among the other schools in the Ivy League, Columbia University and Dartmouth College tied for ninth place. Cornell University finished 14th, and Brown University landed in 16th.
"We're really delighted to see that we are considered one of the top research institutions in the country," Provost Robert Barchi said. "But we knew that already."
Penn moved up in the rankings for the third consecutive year, reaching its highest point in the 15 years that the magazine has published its annual report on the nation's best colleges and universities.
"This is not something you push aside," Engineering School Dean Eduardo Glandt said. "Perception is a part of reality. People look at [the rankings] and that has an effect."
The rankings system has been criticized for years, with many higher education experts claiming it is inconsistent from year to year in quantifying a school's performance.
U.S. News incorporates 16 different categories into its formula, ranging from class size to alumni support to SAT scores.
Each school is given an overall score out of 100 that determines its placement. Penn scored a 95.0 this year, one point higher than last year.
Penn was ranked highly in both faculty and financial resources, coming in first among all universities for resources available to its professors.
But among the top 10 schools, Penn was near the bottom in graduation and retention, as well as in average SAT scores.
The annual U.S. News issue, which has become immensely popular with prospective students, compiles data from the nation's institutions of higher learning, including selectivity, acceptance rate and retention.
"It does have an influence on people who use scales to make that judgment," Dean of Admissions Lee Stetson said. "It will help us in our recruitment efforts."
University President Judith Rodin said that the rankings are important, but should be loosely interpreted.
"While we don't believe that the U.S. News and other rankings should be taken too seriously, we also understand that they are followed with great interest by many of our students and prospective students and their parents, faculty and friends," Rodin said in an e-mail statement.
"We are naturally pleased that we continue to rank among the top national universities," she added.
Barchi said that the University does not put much consideration into the actual rank it receives.
"In any of these rankings you are going to look at, we are always going to come up near the top," he said. "We try not to put an emphasis on it. We think there are too many vagrancies in the system."
Some believed that Penn had reached its peak last year when it finished sixth in the rankings. In 1999, Penn finished seventh.
In addition to the University as a whole, Wharton was recognized as the number one undergraduate business school in the country.
