Duke rose one spot to No. 6 in the 2024–25 edition of U.S. News and World Report’s rankings of top national universities, its highest ranking since 2006.
Duke shares its ranking with CalTech, John Hopkins University and Northwestern University. Princeton University remains at No. 1 for the 14th consecutive year, followed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, Stanford University and Yale University – identical to the 2023-24 list.
The 40th annual rankings were released a day earlier than the announced Sept. 24 date. The Daily Pennsylvanian first published the new rankings on Sept. 9 after reportedly receiving an exclusive “preliminary copy” of the top 10 schools from a U.S. News spokesperson. The University of Pennsylvania fell from No. 6 to No. 10, its lowest ranking since 1997.
The universities in the top 10 list remain the same, with the exception of Brown University, which dropped four places from 9th to 13th in its first top 10 ranking since the 1998/99 edition.
Also behind Duke are Cornell University and the University of Chicago at 11th place, Columbia University at 13th place, and Dartmouth College and the University of California, Los Angeles at 15th place. The universities listed in the top 20 remain unchanged from last year’s rankings.
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill dropped five spots to 27th place, making it the fifth-largest public university in the country. Wake Forest University rose one spot to 46th place, and North Carolina State University jumped to 58th place.
The university rose two spots to No. 11 in the study abroad programs category, just a year after it implemented a 50-student cap for each Duke-approved program and a lottery-based application system for the most popular programs. The change faced resistance from students, who said they were forced to choose programs that did not meet their academic needs.
Duke also dropped from first place to second place in the bachelor’s degree nursing program category.
Notably, this year’s ranking methodology has eliminated the six-year graduation rate of first-year students as a separate metric from the National Universities and HBCUs’ formulas. Instead, U.S. News now measures the graduation rate of Pell Grant recipients, a metric it described as “more standardized for comparison purposes.”
In its ranking of the best national universities, U.S. News evaluates public and private institutions that “offer a range of undergraduate degree programs as well as master’s and doctoral programs and emphasize faculty research or award doctoral degrees in professional practice.” The 2024-25 list includes 436 of nearly 1,500 national universities evaluated, a decrease from last year’s 439 schools.
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| Editor-in-Chief
Abby Spiller is a junior at Trinity and editor-in-chief of the Chronicle’s 120th issue.
