The Best Colleges In New Jersey, According To U.S. News & World Report

U.S. News & World Report has ranked the best universities for 2018, and a New Jersey school has again been named the best in the nation. For the seventh year in a row, Princeton University has been ranked the top school in the nation by U.S. News & World Report.

In total, 28 New Jersey schools were included in the U.S. News & World Report rankings. (A more detailed look at the top New Jersey colleges that made the list can be found below.)

Princeton is trailed by Harvard University, which came in at second place, and the University of Chicago is the third best national university, according to U.S. News. For the 15th consecutive year, Williams College in Massachusetts ranked as the best national liberal arts college, followed in second place by another Massachusetts school, Amherst College.

Public schools made a strong showing in the 2018 rankings. The University of California in Los Angeles tied with the University of California in Berkeley for number one public school among national universities, and the United States Military Academy at West Point ranked as the top public school among national liberal arts colleges. You can add local info on public schools if you have highly ranked ones.

U.S. News relies on various factors in determining the rankings, with retention, graduate rate performance and graduation rate accounting for 30 percent of the rankings.

“Graduation rate performance measures how well schools are graduating their students based on our predictions, which consider spending, test scores and the proportion of students receiving Pell Grants,” U.S. News explains.

Faculty resources account for 20 percent of the rankings — things like class size, student-to-faculty ratio — and financial resources — average spending on things that go directly toward educating undergraduates — accounts for 10 percent of the rankings. The rest of the rankings are based on expert opinion, student excellence and alumni giving.

In New Jersey, the top 10 colleges that made the list are:

Princeton University, Princeton
College of New Jersey, Ewing
Rutgers University--Camden, Camden
Monmouth University, West Long Branch
Rider University, Lawrenceville
Ramapo College of New Jersey, Mahwah
Stockton University, Galloway
Fairleigh Dickinson University, Teaneck
Rutgers University--New Brunswick, Piscataway
Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken

(Click here to see all 28)

The top 5 national universities in the country are:

Princeton University (1)
Harvard University (2)
University of Chicago (3)
Yale University (3)
Columbia University (5)
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (5)
Stanford University (5)

The top 5 national liberal arts colleges are:

Williams College (1)
Amherst College (2)
Bowdoin College (3)
Swarthmore College (3)
Wellesley College (3)

The top 5 national universities among public schools are:

University of California Berkeley (1)
University of California Los Angeles (1)
University of Virginia (3)
University of Michigan Ann Arbor (4)
University of North Carolina Chapel Hill (5)

In its rankings, U.S. News also took a look at student debt, and it turns out that 70 percent of students who graduate from Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., graduate with debt — the average amount of debt being $46,779 — the highest among national universities. For national liberal arts colleges, that number is highest among graduates of St. John’s University in Minnesota, where 66 percent of students graduate with debt with an average amount of debt of $40,272.

Students from Princeton, it turns out, graduate with the least amount of debt among national universities, as do students of Berea College in Kentucky when it comes to national liberal arts colleges.

U.S. News notes that the top national and top national liberal arts universities have significantly higher graduation and freshman retention rates than other schools. That’s a six-year graduation rate of 96 percent for the top 10 national universities and 92.5 percent for top 10 national liberal arts colleges, whereas that same figure for all numerically ranked national universities is 71.7 percent and 75.7 percent for national liberal arts colleges.

See the full rankings here.

PHOTO: Flickr, Kah-Wai Lin

With reporting by Feroze Dhanoa