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While these types of lists are about as valuable as lists for the top paying jobs ^[3], they sure are fun to read, aren’t they? I put even less stock in these types of lists since they’re far more generic than top job lists and less quantifiable. It’s like when the coaches are polled to get the rankings of the NCAA Division I football teams… I can’t remember the last time a pre-season #1 ended up with the trophy that next January (I don’t follow much college football though, I did go to Robocup powerhouse Carnegie Mellon ^[4]).

Here are some fun facts before you get to the list:

• If you compare out-of-state costs, the cheapest university is #25 UCLA at $26,102 a year. The most expensive is #8 Columbia University located in New York, NY with an annual price tag of $39,326. #1 Harvard is an affordable $36,173 a year for tuition and fees.
• There are only three “public” universities, in the sense that they offer in-state tuition discounts, and they are UC Berkeley ($8,932/yr in-state), UVA ($9,300/yr in-state) and UCLA ($7,034/yr in-state).
• The university with the smallest 2007 enrollment was #6 CalTech at 2,133; the largest enrollment was at, not surprisingly, #25 UCLA with 38,896.
• Every one of the eight “Ivy League” universities is on the list (Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, University of Pennsylvania, and Yale), with Brown ranked the lowest at #16. The top 3 are Ivy League schools.
• Each university is scored from 0 – 100, #1 Harvard scored 100 while #25 UCLA scored 73. The lowest “Tier 1″ university, #130 Samford University in Birmingham, AL scored a 32.

The Top 25 Universities

1. Harvard University
2. Princeton University
3. Yale University
4. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
5. Stanford University
6. University of Pennsylvania
7. California Institute of Technology
8. Columbia University
9. Duke University
10. University of Chicago
11. Dartmouth College
12. Northwestern University
13. Washington University
14. Cornell University
15. Johns Hopkins University
16. Brown University
17. Rice University
18. Emory University (T-18th)
19. University of Notre Dame (T-18th)
20. Vanderbilt University (T-18th)
21. University of California at Berkeley
22. Carnegie Mellon University
23. Georgetown University
24. University of Virginia
25. University of California at Los Angeles

Best Colleges 2009 ^[5] [US News & World Report]