The US News and World Report released their latest rankings of colleges this Thursday on their Web site. Princeton University was ranked number one in the rankings, followed by Harvard and Yale (who tied for second place), and with five institutions tied for fourth place. The past few years have seen great debates among educators about the validity of these rankings, with some institutions even refusing to release certain data to groups that prepare these rankings. A new aspect has been added to the data collection for this year's US News and World Report rankings with the inclusion of data from the National Survey of Student Engagement, an addition that is hoped will add a new dimension to the results.

The first link is to a no-fee article for the Chronicle of Higher Education about the rankings, which includes some reactions from Princeton officials. The second link leads to the National Survey of Student Engagement and contains information about their survey and which colleges and universities participate in their research. The third link goes to the US News and World Report 2003 College Rankings, which was released yesterday on their Web site with partial details. The fourth link is from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and contains a collection of helpful articles about the debates over college rankings and their varying methodologies. The fifth link is to a report prepared several years ago by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago that engages in a critical examination of the methodology deployed by the US News and World Report rankings. Finally, the last link leads to the most recent edition of the Princeton Reviews top 345 college rankings for comparative purposes.