Last week, the Wall Street Journal released their annual list of the best colleges in the US for 2025, and it is, put mildly, a bewildering mess. Reading it feels as though the world has turned upside down, with conventionally highly esteemed universities taking the back seat to lesser-known schools.
Right off the bat with the list, objectively prestigious universities like MIT (6th), Harvard (7th), and the University of Pennsylvania (13th) have ranked after WSJ’s #2 pick of… Babson College? If you find yourself scratching your head and asking, what exactly is a Babson, you’re not alone, I did the same thing. Babson College is a small, selective business school outside of Boston. It offers one of the nation’s top entrepreneurship programs, and while I’m sure it offers wonderful opportunities and experiences to its students, ranking it above Ivy League schools is certainly a stretch.
Bizarre upsets like this continue as you go down the list. At #5 is Claremont McKenna, also surpassing Harvard and MIT. Spots 10 and 11 go to Davidson College and Bentley University respectively, San Jose State University takes #16, and UC Merced occupies #18. For perspective, UCLA isn’t found until 50 spots later, at #68. Again, I have no doubt that these schools are fantastic in their own right, but claiming them to be superior to schools which are renowned not just nationally, but globally, is simply not making contact with reality.
Perhaps even more shocking is the lower rankings of universities that are generally reputed to be some of the best in the country. Brown University comes in at #36, Vanderbilt at #44, Dartmouth at #57, Northwestern at #62, University of Chicago at #75 and Johns Hopkins at #92. The WSJ also made the mistake of ranking Duke as #45, thus incurring my wrath and providing the impetus for writing this article.
Of course, this is all highly subjective, and therefore criticizing the WSJ’s quantifying methodology on a matter of personal opinion doesn’t hold up. However, a key characteristic of the rankings, which dampen their credibility, is the erratic fluctuations of many colleges from just last year. Vanderbilt, for example, dropped 31 spots, from 13th in 2024 to 44th in 2025. The University of Florida went from the #1 ranked public university in 2024, to #34 in 2025. Other schools like Brigham Young dropped 43 spots from 20th to 63rd, and UVA shot up a whopping 51 spots from 84th to 33rd.
Now, it’s normal to see some year-to-year fluctuation in college rankings as new data comes in and other factors are taken into account, but certainly not to the extent seen in the WSJ. New data or revelations about current statistics would have to be produced to assert that a university had improved or declined so drastically, such as when Columbia’s ranking dropped suddenly in the US News and Report in 2022 as discoveries were made of the university fudging numbers. The WSJ, however, has schools sliding up and down the rankings seemingly on a whim over a 1-year period at a level that can only be described as capricious.
So, what does this all mean? The WSJ’s recent publishing is part of a larger national movement to redefine the notion of what constitutes a “good school,” shifting away from elite universities and focusing instead on other institutions. Protests over the war in Gaza and abundant charges of anti-semitism in top universities last school year caused many to call for a reconsideration of the esteem held for traditionally elite colleges. Put another way, the Ivies are canceled. So much so that a new tier of schools called the “New Ivies ” was created to propose an alternative to the conventionally accepted best schools in America.
Top schools are even losing currency as the producers of the most coveted employees, one of their most appealing aspects. Numerous schools have for some time been able to offer roughly the same academic experience as elite colleges, but the brand name of the Ivy League was at least supposed to carry some weight in the job market. Now, that doesn’t even offer much of an advantage, as employers are increasingly looking outside of the Ivies for their workforce.
With stereotypical “top schools” purportedly no longer on top, and alternative college quantifiers overcompensating for this by overstating the value of their alternative institutions, do college rankings even matter anymore? And therein perhaps lies the point of the WSJ’s 2025 College Rankings list: the list satirizes the whole idea of college rankings itself, an endeavor which is self-evidently absurd.
If we take anything away from the WSJ’s rankings, it’s that the act of quantifying schools competitively against one another is silly and trivial, because, in reality, every school has something to offer. Even if Babson College isn’t actually better than, say, Harvard, the fact that a source as colossal as the WSJ recognizes it as such puts the relativity of such a system into perspective.
Next week, US News and World Report will release their highly acclaimed rankings, and as high-school seniors once again undergo the distressing college application process, I would advise them to take these lists with a grain of salt. It’s easy to get caught up in the frenzy of the top 10, but even the idea of the top 10 is rapidly evolving, let alone which schools comprise it. In an environment of higher education that is as volatile as the one we’re currently living in, don’t bank on an exclusive bracket of schools culled from dogmatic rankings lists. Choose a school that truly feels like you, and remember, regardless of rankings, you will end up somewhere great.
Leo Goldberg is a Trinity first-year.
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