• Markets: Stocks were a mixed bag yesterday, with the S&P 500 finishing flat and the Nasdaq and Dow moving in opposite directions as investors tried to parse *gestures wildly at everything*. One thing that was clear was that Shopify had a good day after it said it would allow Meta’s Muse AI agent to make purchases on users’ behalf.

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Will Hunting’s employer unseated the institution where Albert Einstein worked as America’s top college. MIT rose to first, while Princeton—which had held the No. 1 spot since 2012—dropped to second place in the 2027 ranking of national universities by US News & World Report.

Since 1983, US News has put out the list that your mom inevitably texts you about every year by combining various criteria to rank colleges:

• This year, MIT got top marks on faculty research, the newly added category of earnings after graduation, and standardized test scores.
• Princeton’s score was roughly unchanged, but its lead over rivals narrowed after US News added faculty research metrics in 2023, the publication told the New York Times.

Meanwhile, Harvard and Yale maintained third and fourth place, respectively. UC Berkeley and UCLA were the highest-ranked public universities on the list, tying for 20th place with Notre Dame overall.

Does anyone care about what US News thinks?

Colleges have criticized the publication for reducing a college’s reputation to a single number and for its ranking methodology like its use of reviews by administrators at rival schools. (Princeton urged students and parents not to obsess over the pecking order in 2021.) The ranking arguably doesn’t have the same hold over the minds of high school upperclassmen as it once did, given that AI chatbots can now provide a granular rundown of a school’s strengths and weaknesses.

But schools still have a symbiotic relationship with US News: They rely on the rankings to market themselves to potential students and begrudgingly supply the publication with data. Meanwhile, the company makes millions licensing branded badges of the rankings to universities, which they tout to students.

Colleges have other top-ranking concerns…as they deal with projections of lower enrollments, declining public trust, doubts about the value degrees deliver amid AI disrupting the job market, and cutbacks in federal funding. Yesterday, Cornell faculty recommended that universities deal with the higher education crisis by altering tuition structure, emphasizing faculty research quality over quantity, and shifting to teaching students human judgment.—SK

      

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