2012 Best Colleges in the United States

In 2012, Princeton University, New Jersey pulls ahead to number one college in the country, beating out Harvard University which ranks only #6 on the Forbes list of top colleges. The top 100 colleges include some of the finest learning facilities in the world. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with Science and Math laboratories that help students to become world leaders in jobs where these technical areas are important. The California Institute of Technology is ranked #18 in the top 100 list of schools to attend in the United States.

Yet the U.S. News & World Report annual college rankings, released Wednesday, are closely scrutinized in higher education. College presidents often denounce the rankings as trivial but pay enormous attention to them because the rankings are seen as the top arbiter of prestige in a vast, costly and unruly marketplace.

The 2012-13 rankings come amid questions about whether and how college administrators manipulate data used in the magazine’s formulas. Claremont ­McKenna College in California and Emory University in Georgia acknowledged this year that school officials had inflated SAT scores of incoming freshmen in key reports. Ultimately, U.S. News concluded that the 2011-12 rankings of the two schools weren’t affected.