ILLINOIS, USA — US News and World Report released its annual rankings of National Universities across the country Tuesday.
The rankings take into account graduation rates, retention, faculty salaries, student-to-faculty ratio, borrower debt and more. For a full list of the ranking factors and weights, click here. According to US News, 78.1% of the nearly 1,500 institutions provided data that comprises the rankings in the spring and summer of 2024.
2024 marked some methodology changes in how the rankings were determined, including increasing the weight of graduation rates. This year also eliminated the factors of first-generation graduation rates and first-generation graduation rate performance, due to lack of data.
The schools in this list include only "National Universities", which are defined as schools that offer a full range of undergraduate majors, as well as master's and doctoral programs. They are also research-oriented schools.
Other ranked separate lists by US News include National Liberal Arts Colleges and Historically Black Colleges and Universities. You can find them here.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, at the top of the list of National Universities were Princeton, Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with single-digit acceptance rates.
- Northwestern University #6
- University of Chicago #11
- University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign #33
- University of Illinois-Chicago #80
- Illinois Institute of Technology #105
- Loyola University Chicago #132
- DePaul University #165
- Bradley University #189
- Illinois State University #220
- Northern Illinois University #273
- Aurora University #273
To see how other schools fared nationally, click here to view the full report.
