The University of Florida fell one spot to No. 7 among public universities in the U.S. News & World Report’s latest rankings, released Tuesday.
The U.S. News & World Report evaluates nearly 1,500 colleges and universities across the country using 17 measures of “academic quality.” It has put an emphasis in recent years on social mobility — the graduation rate of economically disadvantaged students — and post-graduate success.
Top factors included in the rankings this year were peer assessment (20%), graduation rates (16%), graduation rate performance (10%), financial resources per student (8%) and faculty salaries (6%).
The peer assessment is a “measure of how a school is regarded by top administrators at other institutionsand accounts for qualitative attributes of schools that may not be fully captured by the other rankingfactors.”
UF’s ranking, down from a high of No. 5 among public universities in 2022, puts it in a tie with the University of Texas-Austin. The University of California-Los Angeles was rated the No. 1 public university.
Among all universities, UF fell two spots to No. 30 and is in a tie with New York University and the University of Texas-Austin. Directly behind UF and tied for 33rd are the Georgia Institute of Technology, University of California-Davis, University of California-Irvine and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Vanderbilt University, at No. 18, is the highest ranked school in the Southeastern Conference.
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Princeton, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard, Stanford and Yale round out the top five.
Here’s a breakdown of how UF fared in the U.S News & World Report’s other 2025 rankings, with the previous year’s ranking in parenthesis.
- Most Innovative Schools — No. 38 (18)
- Top performers on Social Mobility — No. 51 (47)
- Undergraduate Business Program — No. 23 (29)
- Undergraduate Economics Program — No. 65 (88)
- Undergraduate Computer Science Program — No. 46 (45)
- Undergraduate Engineering Program — No. 35 (34)
- Best Colleges for Veterans — No. 14 (12)
- Bachelor of Science Nursing Program — No. 19 (23)
- Undergraduate Psychology Program — No. 41 (51)
UF has seen its ranking over the past couple of months vary depending on the publication and its methodology. It plummeted from No. 1 in 2024 to No. 34 in the Wall Street Journal’s ranking of public universities. That same list saw the university fall among all universities from No. 15 last year to No. 83. UF came in at No. 7 on the Journal’s list of colleges that offer the best value.
Forbes recently ranked UF as the the No. 4 public university in the nation and among the top institutions in the country for return on investment.