U.S. News' newest Best Colleges list has a new No. 1 — and a new metric, "earnings by major," that changed how schools got there.
The Washington Post reported that U.S. News & World Report's 2027 Best Colleges rankings, released September 22, put MIT at No. 1 — the first time Princeton hasn't held the top spot since the 2012 edition, a 15-year run. Princeton slides to No. 2, with Harvard at No. 3 and Yale holding at No. 4. Caltech jumped six spots to tie Stanford for No. 5. Lower down, Northwestern dropped two spots to No. 9.
U.S. News said MIT's rise was driven by strength in research, student outcomes, and postgraduation earnings. The bigger story is methodology: this year's rankings introduce "earnings by major," a new factor worth 5% of a school's score that replaces the old graduate-indebtedness measure. It compares graduates' earnings four years out, by specific major, using U.S. Department of Education College Scorecard data — and only for students who received federal financial aid and whose highest degree is a bachelor's, a design meant to strip out the effect of family wealth and connections and isolate what the college itself added.
Reaction on Princeton's campus was mixed. University president Christopher Eisgruber has long been a rankings skeptic — he called the whole exercise a "slightly daft obsession" in a 2021 op-ed — and students and faculty largely shrugged off the shuffle. "We still have pride," one student told The Daily Princetonian. "We know what this school means to us."
A one-spot swap at the very top of the rankings is mostly noise. MIT and Princeton were separated by a fraction of a point last year too — nothing about either school's education changed overnight. If your list has schools clustered within a few ranks of each other, treat them as roughly equivalent and decide on fit, cost, and program strength instead.
"Earnings by major" is the more useful signal here, because it's the first time U.S. News is measuring outcomes at the major level instead of averaging across an entire school. A college can be a great overall brand and a mediocre choice for your specific major, or vice versa — and this metric starts to make that visible instead of hiding it inside one aggregate number.
If a school is on your list because of a specific program — engineering, computer science, nursing, whatever it is — check the College Scorecard data for that major directly rather than assuming the school's overall ranking tells you anything about outcomes in your field. The whole point of the new metric is that those two things can diverge.
Rankings move a few spots most years as methodology tweaks ripple through, and this year's shift is bigger than most because of the new metric. That's a reason to research the "why" behind a school's number, not a reason to cross a school off your list because it dropped from No. 7 to No. 9.
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