Northwestern and University of Chicago drop in U.S. News college rankings

Some of Illinois’ most notable universities shifted slightly in national rankings while remaining among the nation’s top schools, according to U.S. News & World Report’s annual best colleges list released Tuesday.

Northwestern University and the University of Chicago remain among the top ten schools in the country, tied for 9th place in the publication’s annual rankings. However, U. of C. fell three places from 6th place in 2026, while Northwestern dropped from 7th last year.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass. pushed New Jersey-based Ivy League institution Princeton University off its 15-year perch as the top-ranked national school.

That’s in part because the framework for ranking schools has shifted in the past year, U.S. News said in a news release.

Each year, the publication uses a series of criteria to rank the schools, including graduation rates, first-year retention rates, graduation rate performance, Pell Grant recipients’ graduation rates, earnings by major, faculty salaries, student-faculty ratio, standardized tests, citations per publication, and more.

This year, however, to address public concerns about “affordability and long-term value” in higher education, the publication introduced a new criterion to the college rankings. “Earnings by Major” is designed to evaluate earnings for four years post-graduation, using data from the U.S. Department of Education’s College Scorecard. This new metric focused specifically on “employed federal financial aid recipients whose highest degree is a bachelor’s,” minimizing the “influence of pre-existing family financial advantages and evaluating institutions on the “true value they add,” the release said.

As a result, roughly 20% of previously ranked institutions moved to new slots this year. With schools now evaluated against a different peer group, the 2027 rankings “cannot be directly compared to prior years,” U.S. News said.

Other Illinois institutions saw similar shifts, including private universities. Illinois Institute of Technology, which faced mass layoffs of faculty and staff earlier this year, dropped slightly from 117 to 121, tying Loyola University Chicago. However, Loyola’s ranking soared 11 notches, from 132 last year.

The state’s public universities also produced mixed results.

The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign rose slightly to tie for 34th place nationally with Boston University, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of California, Davis, the University of California, Irvine, the University of Florida, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Wake Forest University. The University of Illinois Chicago, however, dropped 11 spots from 84th place to tie for 95th with the University of Missouri, American University, Rochester Institute of Technology and Rutgers University-Camden.

The ranking shifts follow both public universities’ recent record enrollment growth. Earlier this month, UIC touted its highest enrollment numbers in the school’s history for the second consecutive year, with over 37,000 students for the fall 2026 semester, while UIUC’s enrollment eclipsed 61,000 for the first time.