Rutgers Named One Of 20 Best Public Colleges In America

NEW BRUNSWICK, NJ — Rutgers University-New Brunswick is now one of the nation’s top 20 public universities, according to U.S. News & World Report’s 2022-2023 Best Colleges rankings, just released Monday.

Rutgers-New Brunswick ranked No. 19 out of Top Public Schools in the U.S.

Princeton University was also ranked No. 1, in a separate list of the Best National Universities. National universities, which focus on research and offer several doctoral programs, are ranked separately from liberal arts colleges and public schools.

Rutgers was also highlighted for its support for veterans and its emphasis on social mobility for students.

For social mobility, Rutgers-Newark is in the top 10 of national universities at #7, while Rutgers-Camden is ranked #30 and Rutgers-New Brunswick #63. Since 2019, U.S. News has factored a school’s success at promoting social mobility by measuring the success of students who received federal Pell Grants, among other factors. Students who receive federal Pell Grants typically come from households whose family incomes are less than $50,000 annually.

The Best Colleges rankings, begun by U.S. News & World Report in the mid-1980s, this year assessed an all-time high of 1,500 U.S. colleges and universities.

Only academic data from its surveys of higher education institutions and reliable third-party sources, including academic peers, are used to calculate each ranking factor.

U.S. News notes that 40 percent of a school’s rank stems from seven different outcomes measuring its success at enrolling, retaining and graduating students from diverse backgrounds with manageable debt. Five factors related to a school’s faculty, including class size and the number of instructional faculty compared with the number of students, account for 20 percent of a school’s rank.

Two businesses emerged in the 1980s that changed higher education: the test-prep business — largely shaped by Stanley Kaplan, who founded Kaplan, Inc. — and the start of the U.S. News & World Report rankings, according to Business Insider.

U.S. News began evaluating universities based on the test scores of admitted students, which prompted colleges to desire more applicants who tested high. The universities offered merit-based scholarships and financial incentives to students who tested high. As a result, affluent parents of college applicants paid for test prep for their children to get those incentives.

James Fallows, a former U.S. News editor, even called them "meaningless" in an interview with NPR.

"The reason they started doing it back in the early 1980s under the guidance of a man named Mel Elfin, was because it was a brilliant business strategy," Fallows said of U.S. News & World Report. "By appealing to the human desire for rankings and knowing where you stand and where somebody else stands, they were able to make a very strong part of their business, which is now basically the only part of their business."

Patch's national team contributed to this report.