U.S. News 2025 Graduate Rankings Feature Surprises
Credit: UCG / Universal Images Group / Getty Images- U.S. News recently published its 2025 edition of graduate school rankings.
- The magazine continues ranking law and medical schools despite boycotts among top institutions.
- Medical schools are listed by tiers and not ordinally ranked.
- Business school deans acknowledge the influence of the magazine’s MBA rankings.
College rankings behemoth U.S. News & World Report continues to tinker with its formulas, resulting in ever-changing positions among the nation’s top institutions.
That’s readily apparent in the new law school rankings, which debuted April 8 along with 2025’s listings for business, medicine, engineering, education, public affairs, and a host of other graduate disciplines.
Law and medical school rankings have captured the most attention in recent years because of controversies surrounding boycotts among top universities.
Frustrated by the criteria U.S. News employs — and likely the public relations circus surrounding each year’s new crop of results — law and medical school deans joined forces in refusing to submit data to U.S. News and complete the magazine’s peer assessment surveys.
But the rankings march merrily along, even without their input.
Harvard Law School Drops to Sixth
Although U.S. News publishes its methodologies, aspects of the magic formulas remain a mystery.
Take law schools, for example. Peer assessments, which account for 12.5% of a school’s ranking, are included “only when submitted by law schools that also submitted their statistical surveys,” the magazine’s website notes. As such, “schools that declined to provide statistical information to U.S. News had their academic peer ratings programmatically discarded before any computations were made.”
So the most logical interpretation of this is that the opinions of deans at most leading law schools regarding peer quality aren’t reflected in these latest rankings thanks to the boycotts.
This may or may not have affected Harvard Law School’s overall score, which dropped the venerable institution to sixth place. That’s right: According to U.S. News, Harvard is the sixth-best law school (tied with Duke Law School, technically speaking) in the nation.
Yet according to peer assessments — those that counted, anyway — it ranks first (tied with Stanford Law). Ask any prospective law student or law professor to rattle off the top five law schools, and Harvard is bound to come up more often than not.
We can quibble all day about perception versus reality with respect to academic quality, but Harvard Law’s descent to sixth place doesn’t pass the smell test, casting doubt on the entire ranking enterprise.
Nonetheless, most of the leading law schools appear in the top 20, though the much-ballyhooed “T14” schools, the ones top students clamor to get into, have changed.
Because of ties, the top 14 list now features 17 schools, with law schools at the University of Texas, Vanderbilt University, and Washington University in St. Louis joining Georgetown University at No. 14.
That leaves Cornell as the only Ivy League law school outside the T14. Last year, it tied with Georgetown at No. 14 and is now No. 18.
For 2025, Stanford Law School and Yale Law School are tied for the top spot once again, and the University of Chicago Law School retains its No. 3 ranking.
The University of Virginia Law School jumped four spots into fourth place, followed by the University of Pennsylvania at No. 5 and Harvard and Duke at No. 6, all of which fell one spot. New York University (NYU), the University of Michigan (both tied at No. 8), Columbia University, and Northwestern University (tied) round out the top 10.
Beyond reputation assessments, U.S. News considers various factors in calculating its rankings formula. Criteria include graduation outcomes (33% of the total score), bar passage rates (25%), assessments from lawyers and judges (12.5%), standardized test scores (5%), and student-faculty ratios (5%), among other measures.
As usual, the magazine advises readers to use these rankings only as a guide, not as the sole means of deciding where to apply or attend.
Medical Schools Again Ranked by Tiers
Last year, U.S. News debuted a new kind of ranking for medical schools. Institutions are no longer listed ordinally but instead within four tiers.
In the “research” category of medical schools, 16 are ranked in Tier 1, and 36 are in Tier 2. Some 20% remain unranked, though, because crunching numbers to determine specific rankings proves difficult when those numbers aren’t available.
Those listed as “unranked” for failing to provide data include medical schools at Brown University, Columbia, Cornell, Duke, Harvard, Georgetown, NYU, the University of Chicago, and Penn.
Notably, medical schools at Yale and Dartmouth College appear in Tier 1.
Readers might assume that institutions ranked in Tier 1 are “better” than those in subsequent tiers, but the absence of some of the world’s most esteemed medical schools renders the exercise rather pointless.
In the case of medical schools, it appears boycott efforts have succeeded.
B-School Deans Say MBA Rankings Are Influential
Business school deans have not joined their law and medical school colleagues in boycotting U.S. News rankings.
While they may not eagerly embrace them, deans do acknowledge the influence these rankings have on prospective students.
A recent survey by Poets & Quants revealed that 3 in 4 deans believe the U.S. News MBA rankings are the most critical factor determining the perception of a school’s quality.
For 2025, Penn’s Wharton School garnered the top spot, breaking its 2024 tie with Stanford Business School, which is now tied for second with Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management.
The University of Chicago (Booth) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Sloan) round out the top five.
Once again, Harvard doesn’t fare as well in these rankings. The university’s business school lands in sixth place, as it did last year, tied with Dartmouth (Tuck) and NYU (Stern). This may come as a surprise given that some similar rankings, such as Fortune magazine’s, list Harvard Business School (HBS) first.
But as Poets & Quants points out, Harvard’s relatively low ranking may be legitimate. Half of U.S. News’ formula considers job placement and starting pay, measures on which Harvard falls somewhat short compared to peer institutions.
Salaries for Harvard master of business administration (MBA) graduates lag behind those of graduates of every other school in the top 10 except for Yale, and its placement rate of 78.4% is dead last within that group.
Research by BestColleges bears this out, showing that Harvard b-school graduates trail their peers from other top schools in terms of job acceptances.
At the same time, only 70% of HBS graduates actually sought employment in 2024, so placement rates may not necessarily mean graduates are applying for jobs unsuccessfully. Many graduates could instead be pursuing additional degrees, starting their own companies, or remaining in positions they already held before attending business school.
This was true for 58% of Stanford and 69% of Wharton graduates last year as well, so placement rates in general tell a partial story at best.
The real story, though, is the continued influence of U.S. News, which, despite boycotts and bad press, churns out new rankings each year that garner widespread coverage (including here at BestColleges). Even if the methodologies and conclusions seem questionable, these rankings can’t be ignored.