Penn falls one spot in rankings

Penn dropped from fourth to fifth place in U.S. News and World Report's university rankings, released Tuesday.

For the second year, the University shares its placement with Stanford University. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the California Institute of Technology, also tied with Penn for fourth place in last year's rankings, have dropped to now share seventh place.

Now occupying fourth place is Columbia University. Harvard University is ranked first, Princeton University second and Yale University third.

Williams College stayed ahead of Amherst College a second time in the category of liberal arts colleges.

U.S. News and World Report's rankings first divide schools based on their mission: liberal arts college or research university. Schools are rated in sixteen areas relating to academic excellence, and are then placed into tiers based on their total score.

“Ranking colleges can indeed serve some useful purpose for parents and students trying to select schools,” according to College Confidential senior advisor Sally Rubenstone. However, Rubenstone also wrote in an e-mail that ranking universities has “turn[ed] up the heat in the college-admissions pressure cooker,” making the process far more stressful.

Head of Hernandez College Consulting Michele Hernandez wrote in an e-mail that since U.S. News and World Report created a ranking system that makes sense, it is “by far the most trusted and well known (and helpful)” of college rankings. She added that though rankings are a good starting point in looking at a school, they are not a substitute for researching a school thoroughly.

Penn’s freshman retention rate stayed the same as last year’s rankings, at 98 percent. Wharton kept its number one spot for best undergraduate business program, followed by MIT and the University of California, Berkeley.

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