Vanderbilt is No. 18 in this year’s “America’s Best Colleges” edition of annual rankings by U.S. News & World Report magazine. The university climbed one position from last year, tying with Emory University and the University of Notre Dame.
Vanderbilt also ranked No. 14 among national universities in the “Great Schools, Great Prices” category, marking it as a good value for its tuition costs. The magazine noted that 12 percent of Vanderbilt students receive Pell Grants for low-income students, ranking the university among the top 25. Vanderbilt’s School of Engineering improved five positions to No. 38.
In the overall rankings Vanderbilt has progressed from No. 24 in 1989 to cracking the top 20 consistently since 2003.
Harvard University was named the top national university. Rounding out the top five were Princeton University, Yale University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University. Highlights of the rankings were published in the Sept. 1 issue of U.S. News & World Report.
Vanderbilt also placed No. 42 in an academic ranking of the top 500 world universities by China’s Shanghai Jiao Tong University, which compiles one of the leading international indexes of major universities. The Chinese university also ranked Vanderbilt No. 34 on a breakdown of the top 100 North and Latin American universities.
“We’re extremely pleased to be recognized as one of the top universities in the world. The ranking reflects the hard work and dedication of our faculty, students and staff members, as well as the distinction of our alumni,” says Richard McCarty, Vanderbilt provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs.
The universities are ranked by the Chinese university according to several indicators of academic or research performance, including the numbers of alumni and staff winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals, the number of highly cited researchers, the number of articles published in the leading international journals Nature and Science, peer-reviewed articles published by faculty and students, and the overall research productivity of the faculty.
Find out more: www.usnews.com/sections/rankings