Penn ranks No. 10 in top college ranking by Wall Street Journal

Penn ranks no. 10 overall best college in the annual Wall Street Journal/Times Higher Education College rankings released earlier this month. The University dropped two places from last year, now placing behind Princeton University. 

The Wall Street Journal conducts its rankings by weighing outcomes at 40 percent and weighing resources at 30 percent. Outcomes include graduates’ salaries and loans. Resources refer to school spending on instruction and student services. 

Overall, Harvard University was ranked first, followed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Yale University. Others in the top 10 include Brown University and Duke University, which were tied for seventh, as well as Princeton University, which took ninth place.

The WSJ determined the rankings after surveying almost 200,000 college students on how challenging they found their classes and whether they have opportunities to collaborate with classmates. 

In rankings based solely on student outcomes, Harvard, Yale, and Duke University tied for first place. Penn came in tenth, the same as its overall ranking. 

A portion of the outcomes category was scored based on comparing predicted salaries to the actual outcomes for graduates 10 years after they enroll at the university. The predicted salaries are calculated from students’ SAT scores, family income, and the university’s number of first-generation students. 

In rankings released this June, Penn was reported as the university with the third-largest number of billionaire alumni. Earlier this March, Penn placed the third highest in research expenditure. In contrast to its other top ten rankings, the University came in as 41st out of 300 on a list of the “best-value” colleges, falling behind the seven other Ivy League schools.