It's back to the top five.
After dropping to the seventh slot on the U.S. News & World Report's national university rankings last year, Penn has climbed back to tie the California Institute of Technology for No. 5.
The new position marks the 11th straight year that the University has been ranked between the fourth and seventh slots.
Former Dean of Admissions Lee Stetson credited the school's increasing selectivity - the undergraduate admission rate dropped to a record-low 15.95 percent for the Class of 2011 - as well as Penn's Ivy League-leading pool of international students for the increase.
Penn once again ranked No. 1 in the Faculty Resources category, which also likely played a role.
Faculty Resources assesses "a school's commitment to instruction" with factors like class sizes and faculty salary.
It makes up 20 percent of a school's overall score, according to the U.S. News Web site.
"Penn in the top group of schools is very appropriate and certainly reflects the quality of the institution in many ways," Stetson said.
The U.S. News rankings have come under attack in recent months after presidents of 12 liberal arts colleges signed a letter in May stating that they would not participate in the peer-assessment portion of the rankings.
The peer-assessment score is derived from university presidents' rankings of other similar institutions and is the most heavily weighted portion of the ranking, accounting for 25 percent of the overall score.
Over 60 colleges have since signed the letter, though no Ivy League president has come out in protest of the survey.
And though the rankings may have instigated controversy, they are still heavily relied upon by perspective students, especially by international students who aren't able to see American universities firsthand.
"The further students and parents reside from Philadelphia, the more important the rankings become," Stetson said. "The international community is very much inclined to base schools on ranking order."
This reflected the case of Wharton freshman Peng Fei Chen, whose parents were unfamiliar with Penn prior to reading the rankings.
"The ranking of Penn helped me convince my parents to come to Penn because it's not widely known in China," he said. "Around 80 percent of the people around me didn't know about Penn."
While Stetson and University President Amy Gutmann were pleased by the jump, both officials, as well as admissions experts, cautioned that slight fluctuations year to year have little bearing on the quality of a school.
"The rankings are helpful in a general sense to see the top ten and top 50, but not for distinguishing from seven or five," said Michelle Hernandez of Hernandez College Consulting.
"Instead, perspective students should take some parts of schools that they're interested in and talk to the professors and focus on the match."
Princeton University took the top spot by itself for the second consecutive year and was again followed by Harvard and Yale universities.
Penn jumped ahead of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which slipped from a three-way tie for fourth last year to the seventh spot this year.
