‘We still have pride’: Students and faculty react to U.S. News ranking that placed Princeton second

On Monday, U.S. News and World Report released the latest version of its annual rankings for best national universities, dropping Princeton from No. 1 to No. 2 for the first time in 15 consecutive years. University students and faculty had mixed reactions to the new ranking.  

When Princeton took the No. 1 mantle in the 2012 rankings, they shared the title with Harvard, who had held the title alone the year prior, and soon dropped to No. 2 two years after Princeton had joined them at No. 1. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who took the No. 2 spot from Harvard in 2023, now sits on the No. 1 throne.

This year’s rankings marked the introduction of a new metric, “earnings by major,” which compares financial outcomes for individual majors within a school, set against a national average. This new metric only considers majors that have graduating classes of at least 30 students, excluding many smaller University majors like art and archaeology, Near Eastern studies, and geosciences. 

STEM-oriented schools similarly did not have many of their humanities majors’ earning outcomes factored in. At MIT, every major in the humanities, social sciences, and economics — barring the “Computer Science, Economics and Data Science” major — had fewer than 30 students in the 2025–26 academic year. 

Princeton Near Eastern studies professor Daniel Sheffield pointed to how the new metric effectively reduces the value of a college education to its earning potential. To him, requiring 30 students to declare a major to even recognize it as “worth counting” invalidates and dilutes the “magic” of a liberal arts education. 

Being able to join a five-person seminar with the world’s leading experts in subjects ranging from astrobiology to classical Arabic literary theory is, according to Sheffield, an invaluable, unquantifiable intellectual experience. 

“If U.S. News thinks an education only counts if it comes in bulk and is measured in dollar signs, they’re missing a huge part of what makes this university — and so many other universities — special,” Sheffield told The Daily Princetonian in an interview. “MIT can have its ranking; I’ll keep the seminar.”

Students expressed similar concerns that the new metric does not fully represent the diversity of academic choices offered at Princeton.

A considerable number of Princeton graduates “might go into careers … that are mostly volunteer-based [and] improve certain aspects of society that don’t necessarily generate income,” Christian Jeng ’29 told the ‘Prince.’ 

“They’re doing things that they’re passionate about. They’re actually serving the nation,” Josh Dismukes ’29 added. “That’s our motto, [and] it is truly what defines the school.”

Some universities that ranked high on U.S. News’ list “might excel at one thing, but then that doesn’t take into [account] the holistic education” a university should have, Jenny Jiang ’30 said.

Many students said that they were caught by surprise by the new ranking. 

Kevin Sun ’27, who was with his roommate when he first saw the news, described how they were momentarily infuriated. Jeng similarly expressed how the outcomes did not meet his expectations. “It sucks,” he said.

Other students were less concerned about the drop in ranking.

“MIT, Princeton, Harvard, Stanford, Yale … are very good schools,” Haoyu Duan ’30 said. “They are actually ranked pretty close to each other, [and] I don’t think this small change from first to second actually affects that much.”

Henry Vidaver ’30 told the ‘Prince’ that when he was applying for college, he “realized that the rankings weren’t really relevant” to him.

Jiang believes that rankings tend not to have a significant influence on how people perceive different universities. “If you look at other rankings, like the QS World Rankings, UNSW Sydney is ranked above Princeton, but that doesn’t mean that conventionally people will think that UNSW Sydney is a better or more prestigious university than Princeton,” she told the ‘Prince.’ 

Additionally, many students said that university ranking mechanisms in general could not properly represent the uniqueness between different universities. “My personal view is you can’t really say one school is better than the other,” Sun said.

“It’s such a reductive thing to be like, ‘MIT is No. 1 and Princeton is No. 2,’” Vidaver said.

“There are so many different ranking systems,” Jeng said. “It really depends on what someone’s looking for.”

“We still have pride,” Tess Evans ’29 told the ‘Prince.’ “We know what this school means to us.”

Albert Tan is a News contributor for the ‘Prince’ from Shanghai and Hangzhou, China. 

Claire Ding is a News contributor for the ‘Prince’ from Cherry Hill, N.J.

Please send any corrections to corrections[at]dailyprincetonian.com.

A correction was made on Sept. 23, 2026: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that MIT took the No. 2 ranking spot from Harvard in 2022. MIT tied Harvard for No. 2 in 2022, and took the spot in 2023. The ‘Prince’ regrets this error.