The top 25 academic, liberal arts colleges, according to "U.S. News and World Report" for 2011 are: 1) Williams College, 2) Amherst College, 3) Swarthmore College, 4)(tie) Middlebury College and Wellesley College, 6) (tie) Bowdoin College and Pomona College, 8) Carleton College, 9) (tie) Davidson College and Haverford College, 11) Claremont McKenna College, 12) (tie) Vassar College and Wesleyan University, 14) Smith College and Washington and Lee University, 16) (tie) United States Military Academy and United States Naval Academy, 18) (tie) Grinnell College, Hamilton College and Harvey Mudd College, 21) (tie) Bates College and Colgate University, 23) (tie) Colby College, Oberlin College and Scripps College.
While "U.S. News and Work Report" separates college and university rankings, some other sources, such as "The Princeton Review," don't. One reason is because many of the large universities contain discrete smaller liberal arts colleges within them. The number one ranking university -- Harvard -- is a prime example. Its Harvard College enrolls just over 5,000 students, just a few hundred more than the U.S. Military Academy. Princeton, Yale, Columbia, Stanford, the University of Pennsylvania, California Institute of Technology, and MIT round out the top 8 universities. They are followed by: (tie) Darmouth College, Duke University and the University of Chicago, 12) Northwestern University, 13) (tie) Johns Hopkins and Washington University, 15) (tie) Brown and Cornell, 17) (tie) Rice and Vanderbilt, 19) Notre Dame, 20 Emory University, 21) Georgetown, 22) University of California at Berkeley, 23) (tie) Carnegie Mellon and University of Southern California, 25)(tie) UCLA, University of Virginia, and Wake Forest.
"U.S. News and World Report" uses 16 key measures in determining the college and university rankings. The criteria include academic reputation as judged by peer schools and school counselors, graduation rates, faculty characteristics (such as faculty pay, class size and percent holding graduate degrees at the highest level), accepted student characteristics (such as average test scores and high school class ranking), financial resources and alumni giving.
"U.S. News and World Report" uses the wrong measures to determine school rankings, according to Forbes Magazine. Forbes prefers standards that hone in on results. Do students like their classes; how many win Rhodes Scholarships and Fulbright grants; how many graduates are listed in Who's Who in America? When considering what college or university you might like to attend, know what you want out of a school and what measurements are important to you.