With another year comes another set of college rankings.
Duke ranked No. 9 in the 2022 edition of Forbes’ America’s Top Colleges List, recovering the three places it fell in last year’s Forbes ranking.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology ranked first this year, replacing the University of California, Berkeley.
Forbes’ college rankings aim to identify those schools that “offer an excellent education at a great price, graduate high-earners and propel students to become successful entrepreneurs and influential leaders in their fields.”
Last year’s ranking represented a shift in methodology after a suspension of the list in 2020. This shift in methodology incorporates different factors, including first-year retention rate, debt upon graduation and salary post-graduation. The methodology change has resulted in several Ivy League universities falling in ranking, with 2020 data now being included in the three-year average to compute first-year retention rate.
According to Forbes, higher percentages of first-year students did not return for their second year at Ivy League colleges in 2020, compared to other colleges and universities.
Two public universities, both within the University of California system, are ranked in the top 10.
Stanford University ranked second on this year’s Forbes list, followed by the University of California, Berkeley; Princeton University; and Columbia University in the third, fourth and fifth places. The University of California, Los Angeles ranked sixth, Williams College slated in at seventh and Yale University ranked eighth, just ahead of Duke.
Harvard University, a perennial top-five university both nationally and globally across ranking systems, dropped to fifteenth on the list and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is ranked 28th.
Forbes’ list is created from a subset of universities that “educate undergraduates” according to their Carnegie Classification. The top 500 schools of the nearly 4,000 in the United States are ranked.
Duke placed 9th in the U.S. News and World Report’s Best National Universities ranking in 2021, marking a return to the ranking’s top 10, from being ranked 12th in 2020. The 2022-23 edition of the Best National Universities ranking will be released on Sept. 12.
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Adway S. Wadekar is a Trinity junior and former news editor of The Chronicle's 119th volume.