Colleges & Universities

The Ultimate List of 2010 College and University Rankings

College rankings can be a contentious topic, but students use them despite the controversies. The problem, however, is how to find the best rankings in a search engine when every other college blog and site all point to U.S. News and World Report or to Kiplinger — and not always to the latest rankings. We’ve made the search for the ultimate list of 2010 college and university rankings easy for you — the list below contains three dozen college rankings that range from world universities to topical searches for MBAs, and this list includes the latest rankings from top sources.

This list is categorized, and the links to each ranking system are listed alphabetically within those categories. For instance, the U.S. College all-around rankings contains the most comprehensive rankings of U.S. colleges, ranked by a variety of different criteria other than size, cost, or age. The list for law degrees or MBA programs is self-explanatory. The last category offers some tools and searches that may help you feel more independent about your search for the ultimate degree program and college.

U.S. Colleges: All-Around Rankings

  1. America’s Best Colleges 2009: Forbes.com offers the best public and private colleges and universities from the student’s point of view.
  2. Best Colleges 2010: U.S. News and World Report’s college rankings spotlight schools with outstanding examples of eight types of academic programs that have been shown to enhance learning: first-year experiences, learning communities, writing in the disciplines, senior capstone, study abroad, internships or cooperative education, opportunities for undergraduate research, and service learning.
  3. Best College Rankings: This site ranks colleges by year and subject as well as by specialty rankings. You also can learn about other college topics through their articles.
  4. Campus Grotto: Made famous by their annual list of most expensive colleges, Campus Grotto has been featured in major publications around the world.
  5. College Prowler: This site ranks each school across the 20 most relevant campus life topics — everything from the quality of the academics to the attractiveness of the opposite sex.
  6. The Princeton Review: You must register to learn about these rankings, but they are some of the most well-respected college rankings around. Learn more about college choices by politics, by type of school, by town life and…yes…even by academics and administration.
  7. Washington Monthly College Rankings: Unlike U.S. News and World Report and similar guides, this one asks not what colleges can do for you, but what colleges are doing for the country. Find out which colleges provide the best education for the money.

Which Degree?

  1. Community College Week: Rankings of associate degree & certificate producers for 2009.
  2. Student Review Monthly Undergraduate College Rankings: Student Review is just that — reviews and updates provided by students on the best undergraduate programs around. This is a great resource with listings by topic, salary, top Ivy League schools and more.
  3. PhDs.org: Instead of ranking programs according to someone else’s priorities, this site allows you to choose what’s important to you. You fill in the blanks, and the site generates a ranking of departments that suit your needs.

Law Schools

  1. 2009 Raw Data Law School Rankings: This list of 185 law schools is provided by the Internet Legal Research Group. The categories are comprised of GPA and LSAT scores, acceptance rate, student-faculty ratio and more. You also might be interested in the ranking by employment rate for 2009.
  2. Brian Leiter’s Law School Rankings: This well-known law school ranking includes, for 2009, top forty law schools by student numbers, a list of where current law professors went to school, the top ten law faculties in scholarly impact and Supreme Court clerkships, 2000-2008 terms.

Business Degrees

  1. 2009 Full-time MBA Ranking: The Economist ranking of full-time MBA programs was based on an initial selection of 135 leading business schools around the world.You also can customize this ranking search.
  2. EMBA Rankings 2009: Financial Times provides the rankings of Executive MBA programs
  3. Global MBA Rankings 2009: The top 10 schools, from the joint first London Business School and Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania to New York University: Stern, form the leading group of world class business schools. Offered by Financial Times.
  4. Green MBA Rankings – Beyond Grey Pinstripes: TopMBA offers the only ranking that looks beyond reputation and test scores to measure how well business schools are preparing their students for the environmental, social and ethical complexities of modern-day business.
  5. The Best Undergraduate Business Schools: BusinessWeek sets aside an entire section in their site dedicated to the best undergraduate business degrees in the country.

Private Schools

  1. America’s Best Private Colleges: Forbes offers a list of private colleges ranked by cost, class size, student to faculty ratio, SAT and ACT ranges and admission rates.
  2. Kiplinger Private Colleges: View rankings for the top 50 private liberal arts colleges and top 50 private universities. You can sort the schools in this survey by overall rank, cost, quality measures or financial aid measures (which is how Kiplinger scored the colleges).

Public Schools

  1. America’s Best Public Colleges: These twenty-five schools rank highest in terms of student experience. Offered by Forbes.
  2. Kiplinger Public Colleges: The 100 best values in public colleges is geared to 2009-2010. Kiplinger updates and ranks this list and you can sort the overall rankings for both in-state or out-of-state students, cost, quality measures or financial aid by location.

Online Degree Rankings

  1. Get Educated: This site ranks online degrees by best buys, satisfaction and the best public perception of any given online degree program.
  2. OEDb: Online Education Database offers one of the first and most thorough online college ranking systems around. And, you can bet that they’re all accredited schools, too.
  3. The Distance Education and Training Council: Although this is more of a search site rather than a ranking site, the DETC can help you learn more about which distance-learning programs are accredited.

Ethnic Interest

  1. 25 Top Colleges for Hispanics: Hispanic Magazine’s aim was to find the schools that, in addition to sustaining a tradition of excellence, offer support and resources for groups underrepresented in higher education, Hispanics in particular.
  2. Best Colleges for Asian Americans: In addition to students’ comments, Asian Nation included statistics and charts on a wide range of factors that affected overall ratings, including incidents of ethnic slurs and offensive language or behaviors, physical assaults and other social environmental qualities.

World Rankings

  1. 2009 Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU): These rankings identify the leading 500 universities around the world and are widely referenced by the global university community.
  2. 2009 Performance Ranking of Scientific Papers for World Universities: This link leads to background information for this study. Be sure to look through the links at the top of the page to find the top 500 universities, top universities by continents and top universities by country.
  3. Ranking Web of World Universities: This ranking has been in operation since 2004, covering more than 18,000 Higher Education Institutions worldwide. Web presence measures the activity and visibility of the institutions and it is a good indicator of impact and prestige of universities.
  4. SIR 2009 World Report: The SCImago Institutions Rankings (SIR) show over 2000 of the best worldwide research institutions and organizations. The ranking includes several indicators, such as output, visibility, collaboration and impact.

College Searches and Tools

  1. College Navigator: Learn about college statistics while searching for an on-campus or for online learning degrees. This search engine, provided by IES (see immediately below), provides a number of different statistics for each school listed.
  2. IES National Center for Education Statistics: This government site offers a broader look at the nation’s colleges and universities. It is fueled by The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), the primary federal entity for collecting and analyzing data related to education.
  3. Peterson’s: In this college search site, you pick the college by what’s most important to you…basics, student body ration, selectivity and GPA, academics and campus life are just a few of the options available.
  4. Rating the College Rankings: This CBSNews article takes some of the most well-known college ranking systems (most included in this article) and ranks those ranking systems.
  5. U.S. Universities by State: Use this handy list provided by the University of Texas at Austin to pick and choose universities. This is a great tool, as you can use the list as a checklist. They also offer the list organized alphabetically. You also can study U.S. Community Colleges by State on the same Web site.
  6. What Will They Learn? This Web site rates each college on whether the institution requires seven core subjects: Composition, Literature, Foreign Language, U.S. Government or History, Economics, Mathematics, or Natural or Physical Science. The grade is based on a detailed review of the latest online course catalogs.
Staff Writers