Cornell Ranks 12th in U.S. News 2026 Rankings
U.S. News’ annual list is one of the most cited across higher education. On September 23, U.S. News released its ranking of the top 400 national research universities.
Cornell ranks in 12th place between Cal Tech in 11th and Brown and Dartmouth in 13th. U.S. News also ranks Cornell in 2nd place for Best Colleges for Veterans.
Here is the U.S. News rankings and the Forbes rankings for the Ivy League:
| University | US News | Forbes |
| Princeton | 1 | 3 |
| Harvard | 3 | 6 |
| Yale | 4 (tie) | 9 |
| Penn | 7 (tie) | 10 |
| Cornell | 12 | 14 |
| Dartmouth | 13 (tie) | 17 |
| Brown | 13 (tie) | 18 |
| Columbia | 15 | 2 |
Yale tied with Stanford for 4th place, and Penn tied with Northwestern and Johns Hopkins for 7th place.
Cornell relies upon national rankings such as U.S. News and Forbes to drive applications for undergraduate admissions. Cornell accepts about 8% of its applicants.
Methodology
The 17 factors used in U.S. News’ National University rankings are:
- Graduation rates 16%
- First-year retention rates 5%
- Graduation rate performance 10%
- Graduation rates for students receiving Pell Grants 5.5%
- Pell graduation performance 5.5%
- Graduates of this school earning more than a high school grad 5%
- Borrower debt 5%
- Peer assessment 20%
- Financial resources per student 8%
- Faculty salaries 6%
- Full-time faculty 2%
- Student-faculty ratio 3%
- Standardized tests 5%
- Citations per publication 1.25%
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact 1.25%
- Publication share in the Top 5% of Journals by CiteScore 1
- Publication share in the Top 25% of Journals by CiteScore 0.5%
U.S. News’ methodology has evolved in recent years. First, some colleges have been caught cheating when completing their questionnaires. Specifically, Columbia was caught in 2022. However, the staff of the U.S. News now audits and verifies the data submitted by colleges.
The composition of the top colleges has also changed over time. As college ranking methods have grown more transparent, and the competition for accuracy among ranking firms has increased, non-Ivy schools have climbed the top rankings, surpassing the Ivies in many cases. However, with 20% of each school’s rankings based upon “peer assessment,” the rankings are criticized as subjective and, to a degree, self-perpetuating.
Finally, many of the ranking factors lag current campus conditions by many years, so the U,S, News rankings do not yet reflect the impact of recent Trump Administration actions against Ivy League schools.
