NEW YORK — For those checking the U.S. News & World Report’s 2025 Best Colleges list, it will likely come as no surprise that New York, New Jersey and Connecticut’s Ivy League schools are among the top. But which schools outrank their peers?
New Jersey took home top honors, with Princeton University ranked number one in national universities. Connecticut is also up there, with Yale University coming in at number five.
New York fell just shy of the top 10, with Cornell University tied with the University of Chicago for 11th, and Columbia University tied with Brown University for 13th.
- #1 Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey
- #2 Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts
- #3 Harvard University in Cambridge Massachusetts
- #4 Stanford University in Stanford, California
- $5 Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut
- #6 (tie) California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California
- #6 (tie) Duke University in Durham, North Carolina
- #6 (tie) Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland
- #6 (tie) Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois
- #10 University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
- #11 (tie) Cornell University in Ithaca, New York
- #11 (tie) University of Chicago in Chicago, Illinois
- #13 (tie) Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island
- #13 (tie) Columbia University in New York, New York
- #15 (tie) Dartmouth University in Hanover, New Hampshire
- #15 (tie) University of California – Los Angeles in Los Angeles, California
New York University tied with the University of Florida and the University of Texas-Austin for 30th. Of the state’s SUNY schools, Stony Brook ranked the highest in a tie for 58th.
Two New York schools also made significant progress climbing up the list this year. D’Youville University, in Buffalo, jumped 61 spots up to 259th, the most growth of any school, and Dominican University New York, in Orangeburg, jumped 40 spots up to 329th.
New Jersey’s second-place school is Rutgers University-New Brunswick in a tie for 41st, and Connecticut’s is the University of Connecticut also in a tie for 70th.
The rankings are based on 17 key measures, including retention and graduation rates, student-to-faculty ratios, earnings and debt, and standardized tests.
See the full list and filter by school type here.