Harvard has bigger classes and a higher student-to-faculty ratio than both Yale and Princeton, according to the rankings.

Princeton’s student-to-faculty ratio is six to one, while Yale had seven students for each faculty member and Harvard eight.

Despite posting the lowest graduation rate, faculty resources rank, admissions rate, and alumni giving percentage, Yale tied Harvard for second on the strength of its per-student spending, placing second nationally. Harvard ranked tenth and Princeton was number 11.

The rest of the Ivy League was spread throughout the top 20, with the University of Pennsylvania tied for number four, Dartmouth and Columbia following at numbers nine and 10, Cornell at 14 and Brown at 17. Stanford, Duke, MIT, and the California Institute of Technology also tied for fourth.

During the past decade, a number of colleges have traded places in the rankings due to tweaks in methodology. Recently, each of the “Big Three” have all held the top spot as well as the California Institute of Technology.

In an open letter to Fallows when he was editor of U.S. News in 1996, Stanford’s President wrote that “the people behind the U.S. News rankings lead readers to believe either that university quality pops up and down like politicians in polls, or that last year’s rankings were wrong but this year’s are right (until, of course, next year’s prove them wrong).”

That year, Harvard fell from the top faculty resources rank to number 11, while Duke climbed from number 13 to number four.

Mitchell said these fluctuations stripped the rankings of any credibility.

“They change the methodology every year to sell magazines. My view is that U.S. News is out to sell magazines and we are out there to educate people,” he said.

According to Folkers, the methodological adjustments have primarily involved the addition of categories to provide a fairer assessment.

“We have a lot of critics and we’re not afraid of the questions,” he said. “Taking care of the schools is not our mission. It’s not something we do for the benefit of colleges. It’s something we do for the benefit of students and their families.”

—Staff writer Dan Rosenheck can be reached at rosenhec@fas.harvard.edu.