College Rankings

According to a recent post on CBS’s MoneyWatch.com, the University has the second best four-year graduation rate for private colleges in the United States. 

Princeton computer science is a fine department, but is it better than, say, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which came in third? MIT was second in 1995, after Stanford and followed by University of California, Berkeley; Carnegie Mellon University; and Cornell — a quite reasonable result. Other computer science departments were jerked around wildly; for instance, computer science at the University of Washington went from ninth to 38th, a most unlikely outcome.

Princeton was ranked fifth and tenth among the world’s best universities, according to two major rankings released this month. Times Higher Education put Princeton behind Harvard, California Institute of Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford, in that order, in a ranking released yesterday, while QS placed Princeton behind four British universities, Harvard, Yale, MIT, University of Chicago and Caltech. University of Cambridge had the best score in the QS ranking.

Princeton dropped to second place after Harvard in U.S. News & World Report’s ranking of America’s best colleges and universities, according to an Associated Press story posted around 4 p.m. on Aug. 16 at whiznews.com.