Cornell Ranks 14th in U.S. News and Forbes 2027 Rankings
U.S. News’ annual list is one of the most cited across higher education. On September 22, U.S. News released its ranking of the top 400 national research universities. On September 10, Forbes magazine released its ranking of 500 top colleges.
Cornell’s U.S. News rank dropped from 12th place to a tie for 14th place with Carnegie Mellon. For the second year, U.S. News also ranks Cornell 2nd among Best Colleges for Veterans.
For the first time, MIT has displaced Princeton at the top of the U.S. News rankings.
Forbes kept Cornell at 14th place in its 2027 rankings, between Duke and Northwestern.
Here are the U.S. News rankings and the Forbes rankings for the Ivy League:
| University | US News | Forbes |
| Princeton | 2 | 2 |
| Harvard | 3 | 3 |
| Yale | 4 | 9 |
| UPenn | 7 | 5 |
| Dartmouth | 12 (tie) | 17 |
| Columbia | 12 (tie) | 4 |
| Cornell | 14 (tie) | 14 |
| Brown | 16 | 18 |
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 (for colleges with usable SAT/ACT scores) 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%
- Earnings by major: 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 uses different weighting when the SAT/ACT scores are not usable.
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 U.S. News now audits and verifies the data submitted by colleges. 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.
