WASHINGTON, Aug. 19 (UPI) -- Harvard and Princeton have tied for the top spot in the ratings of the best universities in the United States, as determined by U.S. News and World Report.
The annual survey gives Harvard and Princeton's Ivy League a lot to crow about -- none of the conference's eight members is ranked lower than 15th in the ratings released Friday.
Among the other Ivy League schools, Yale was third followed by Penn at No. 4. Columbia and Dartmouth tied for ninth while Cornell was tied for 13th and Brown tied for 15th.
Duke and Stanford tied for fifth with the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology tied at No. 7.
Cal-Berkeley, which was tied for 20th overall, was ranked the top public university.
A pair of Massachusetts institutions -- No. 1 Williams College and No. 2 Amherst College -- were rated the best in the liberal arts category, with the Virginia Military Institute the top public liberal arts college.
U.S. News measures 15 "indicators of academic excellence," such as faculty resources and student selectivity and student retention. The biggest category -- peer assessment, in which top academics contacted by the magazine rate schools -- is worth 25 percent of a university's score.
