Northwestern University moved up a notch in the latest U.S. News ranking of national universities.
It tied for 10th this year with Johns Hopkins University, up from 11th last year.
U.S. News ranked Princeton first and Harvard second.
Then four schools were in a tie for third place — Columbia University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Chicago, and Yale University.
Stanford University ranked seventh. Duke and Penn were tied for eighth.
All the schools in the top 10, except Princeton, have tuition and fees that exceed $50,000 a year. Princeton’s sticker price came in at $47,140.
The publication says it bases the rankings on 16 measures of academic quality — including first-year student retention, graduation rates and the strength of the faculty.
It says it changed the ranking system this year to consider a school’s success at promoting social mobility by measuring the graduation rates of lower income students compared to the student body as a whole.
