The 25 Most Desirable Urban Schools

For students who crave the additional enrichment that an urban environment offers, this is your list.  We based our overall desirability ranking based on yield (the percentage of accepted students who enroll), admissions, test scores, endowment, student-to-faculty ratio, retention, as well as climate and the quality of facilities, housing, and dining.  And when we adjusted our overall school desirability ranking to include only schools located in large or midsize cities, Harvard, Yale, and MIT wound up in the top three slots. Two of the three may be in the Boston area--which is home to some 80 undergraduate institutions--but, according to this list, the most desirable city is New York, where you find Columbia University, Cooper Union, NYU, and Barnard, the only single-sex school on the list, and one of  five original Seven Sisters colleges that remain all women.
 
Contributing editor Peter Bernstein and researcher Courtney Kennedy drew on dozens of sources to compile these rankings including information from the National Center for Education Statistics, The Washington Monthly, and College Prowler.   A portion of the data they used is represented in the following school profiles, but for the full methodologies, see our FAQ here.   And if you're not a rankings fan, take a look at this piece by Colin Diver, the president of Reed College,  about why schools dislike rankings and how families can use them wisely as part of their college decision-making process.  
 
For more from College Prowler, visit their website.