NOTE: This post will be updated within a few days to include the 8-year period 2017-2024, thus including the US News rankings released in September 2024.

Below is our annual update of US News average rankings across the most recent eight-year period. Our first effort, covering the years 2014-2021, showed that public university rankings as a whole declined by 4.4 percent during that timeframe, while the decline for private universities was slightly less at 4.3 percent.

This time around, public universities have made significant gains overall, reflecting in part the changes in US News methodology. The overall rankings for publics did decline, but only by 3.0 percent. Meanwhile, the overall rankings for private universities declined by 5.4 percent.

The table below does not include universities that moved into the national university category since 2014 or that were not rated among the top 125 in that category in 2014. But here is a list of those and their 2023 ranking.

Villanova, 51; Santa Clara, 55; Loyola Marymount, 77; Gonzaga, 83; Elon, 89; Illinois-Chicago, 97; NJIT, 97; South Florida UCF, 97; UC Merced, 97; RIT, 105; Utah, 105; Creighton, 115; Rutgers Newark, 115; and Temple, 121.

The new list has several dramatic changes, some of them making sense only if there were major adjustments or corrections to the data reported from the universities. For example, the ranking of Penn State was 47 in 2016 but 77 in 2023. The most dramatic improvement among publics was Florida State, which moved from 96 to 55 during the eight years. Undoubtedly, the biggest change among elite private institutions was the drop of Columbia from 4 to 18 across the same span of years. The decline came after accusations by a math professor that Columbia “fudged” numbers in previous years.

In the coming weeks we will also post our annual comparison of US News Rankings, academic reputation rankings, and departmental rankings.