America’s Best Colleges
* Baccalaureate Colleges
* Business programs
* Engineering programs
* Master’s Universities
* National Universities
* Liberal Arts Colleges

The Top Ten States, with the number of Top Colleges represented:

1. New York (29)
2. California (22)
3. Pennsylvania (19)
4. Massachusetts (19)
5. Virginia (9)
6. Texas (9)
7. Ohio (8)
8. Illinois (8)
10. Georgia (6)  tie
10. Indiana (6)  tie

1. Stanford University (Stanford, California)
2. University of Chicago (Chicago, Illinois)
3. University of California–Berkeley (Berkeley, California)
4. University of Michigan–Ann Arbor (Ann Arbor, Michigan)
5. Columbia University (New York, New York)
6. University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania)
7. New York University (New York, New York)
8. Harvard University (Cambridge, Massachusetts)
9. University of Californi–Los Angeles (Los Angeles, California)
10. Northwestern University (Evanston, Illinois)

* #1 School for Undergraduate Academics — Univ. of Chicago (Chicago, IL)
* Best Professors — Middlebury College (Middlebury VT)
* Most Beautiful Campus — Pepperdine Univ. (Malibu CA)
* Best Dorms — Smith College (Northampton MA)
* Best Campus Food — Bowdoin College (Brunswick ME)
* Happiest Students — Brown Univ. (Providence RI)
* Most Liberal Students — Warren Wilson College (Asheville NC)
* Most Conservative Students — Hillsdale College (Hillsdale MI)
* Toughest to Get Into — Massachusetts Inst. of Technology (Cambridge MA)
* Most Diverse Student Body — DePaul Univ. (Chicago IL)
* Best College Library — Harvard College (Cambridge MA)
* Best College Newspaper — Yale Univ. (New Haven CT)

1. Seattle, WA
2. San Francisco, CA
3. Raleigh, NC
4. Washington, DC
5. Austin, TX
6. Minneapolis, MN
7. Atlanta, GA
8. Boston, MA
9. San Diego, CA
10. Lexington-Fayette, KY

Best National Universities
1. Princeton University
2. Harvard University
3. Yale University
4. California Institute of Technology
– Massachusetts Institute of Technology
– Stanford University
7. University of Pennsylvania
8. Duke University
9. Columbia University
– Dartmouth College
– University of Chicago

To rank colleges, U.S. News first places each school into categories based on mission (research university or liberal arts college) and, for universities offering a range of master’s programs and colleges focusing on undergraduate education without a particular emphasis on the liberal arts, by location (North, South, Midwest, and West). Universities where there is a focus on research and that offer several doctoral programs are ranked separately from liberal arts colleges, and master’s universities and comprehensive colleges are compared against other schools in the same group and region. Second, they gather data from and about each school in 15 areas related to academic excellence. Each indicator is assigned a weight (expressed as a percentage) based on their judgments about which measures of quality matter most. Third, the colleges are ranked based on their composite weighted score. U.S. News publish the numeric rank of roughly the top half of schools in each of the 10 categories; the remainder are placed into the third and fourth tiers, listed alphabetically, based on their overall score in their category.