If you’re biting your nails and grinding your teeth wondering where to send your child to college, U.S. News & World Report has just released the 2017 Best Colleges rankings. Princeton University has the topped the list of Best National Universities again.
2017 U.S. News Best National Universities
- Princeton University (NJ)
- Harvard University (MA)
- University of Chicago (IL) (tie)
- Yale University (CT) (tie)
- Columbia University (NY) (tie)
- Stanford University (CA) (tie)
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- Duke University (NC) (tie)
- University of Pennsylvania (tie)
- Johns Hopkins University (MD)
I’m always happy to see my alma mater, Duke University, make the list. I turned down an Ivy League to go there. They didn’t have the U.S. News rankings then, but all of the Ivies were placed higher at the time. I was cleaning out a closet at my parents’ house last year after Dad died. I found the Columbia University acceptance letter in an album along with five departmental prizes from my junior year in high school. Did I make the wrong choice? There’s an old saying, “Hindsight is 20/20.” Looking back, I picked the right school for me. Duke had the programs that I wanted. Would I feel this way if the school wasn’t so highly ranked today? I didn’t care then, and I don’t care now. Some of the criteria used to rank seems bogus. The Wall Street Journal has just come out with it’s own U.S. college rankings that “pull back” from traditional measures like SAT scores or the accept rate and look at how engaged students feel and how well graduates do. WSJ ranks Stanford and MIT higher than the Ivies. WSJ doesn’t rank some of the Ivies too well.
- Stanford University
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- Columbia University
- University of Pennsylvania
- Yale University
- Harvard University
- Duke University
- Princeton University
- Cornell University
- California Institute of Technology
It all comes down to how you look at it. There are many good schools that employers recruit from. Did you notice how my alma mater bumped up a spot?
Winnie Chen Twitter Post
Parents should worry more about what happens when their child gets to campus. There is a dramatic email exchange between future college roommates that is going viral. It’s at one of the U.S. News & World Report’s highly ranked public colleges. In a Twitter post, incoming UCLA freshman Winnie Chen showed screenshots from the purported email exchange. One of her two future roommates, only referred to as Ashly, sends an angry list of demands to Chen and refers to herself as a “ticking time bomb.”
“I want the desk that’s near the widow. Plain and simple…Don’t try me,” writes Ashly who admits she has “anger issues.”
You can read more about the exchange in an interview with Chen on The Tab.
My advice, have your freshman request a single. If that fails, make sure your child packs a wire cutter and some running shoes.