The Harvard Crimson :: Harvard Tops Princeton, But Students Dismiss Rankings

"For the first time in a dozen years, Harvard won an unchallenged first in the U.S. News 'Best Colleges' ranking, an achievement that knocked Princeton off of the pedestal on which it had sat for the past eight years.

A handful of Ivy League schools plus Stanford, MIT, Caltech, the University of Chicago, and Duke round out the top ten.

Robert Morse, U.S. News' director of data research, said that because the difference between the top three schools has been small, 'it didn't take a great amount of movement to push Harvard ahead of Princeton.'

A few media outlets had reported that changes in class size allowed Harvard to pass Princeton, but Morse said that small changes across the board—in areas such as student retention, financial resources, faculty resources, and peer assessment score—also played a role."