- [Narrator] Last year, the pandemic caused one

of the most disruptive periods

in American higher education,

forcing many schools to cancel classes,

adopt remote learning and scale down campus activities.

But you wouldn't know it from this year's

Wall Street Journal/Times Higher Education Rankings report.

Compared to the 2021 report,

there was little change in the top tier schools.

- The best schools in The Wall Street Journal rankings

are strong across the board.

Harvard is number one

because it ranked third in outcomes,

resources, and engagement.

Its only weakness was environment where it ranked 134.

But that only counts for 10% of the rank.

Stanford was right behind.

Rankings of third in outcomes,

fourth in resources, and 60 in engagement.

Yale and Princeton tied for the best outcomes,

and the California Institute of Technology

had the most resources.

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- [Narrator] The rankings are based on 15 factors

across four main categories,

including student outcomes,

academic resources, student engagement

and the learning environment.

With so little change in the top schools,

what can we learn from this year's report

about the state of higher education amid the pandemic?

- I think the takeaway from this year's report,

and it really does stand

across all of the reports we've done

is that money matters in higher education.

It takes generations to build up the kind of resources

that can insulate universities from the kind

of troubles that we've seen

over the last couple years with COVID

and all the costs that that's taken into place.

That disruption has hurt schools lower down

that have less money, that are tuition dependent

but they're much less likely to have any kind

of significant impact on a school

with an endowment over $10 million.

- [Narrator] The report also measures the best value

among the top 250 schools.

- And the way the rankings do that

is by dividing each institution's overall score

by its net price, by what students are actually paying.

And by this measure, the number one school

is the City College of New York,

the flagship of the public city universities,

the CUNY system.

The runner-up is another CUNY school,

Bernard M. Baruch College,

followed by Berea College,

which is a private liberal arts school in Kentucky

that doesn't charge tuition.

- [Narrator] Only two of the schools ranked

in the top 10 for best value

are private universities: Berea and Stanford University.

Value aside, private universities dominate the rankings.

- [Doug] It's not until number 24 on our list

that you reach the University of Michigan

at Ann Arbor.

That's the first public school.

Following that, you get the University of California,

Los Angeles at 27.

So the wealthiest private schools in the country

are where the concentration

of the best schools are right now.

- [Narrator] The rankings reflect a growing gap

in price between public and private intuitions.

- It costs a lot of money

to educate a college student.

In a lot of cases, the tuition does not begin

to cover the actual cost of educating a student.

So if a school can draw on an endowment

to help support the academic spend,

and the different opportunities that a student has,

then that is gonna help out the rankings,

it's gonna have all the education.

- [Narrator] A subset of the rankings focuses

on school environment.

- [Doug] These rankings are led by La Sierra University,

which is a small Seventh Day Adventist school

in Riverside, California.

About half of La Sierra's

undergraduates receive Pell Grants.

Rutgers University in New Jersey comes in second

in the environment ranking.

Followed by the Cal State University of Northridge,

Irvine, San Francisco.

They all tied for third.

- [Narrator] The Wall Street Journal's report

uses a different ranking system,

compared to other rankings reports

like U.S. News' Best Colleges.

- Our methodology looks more closely at outcomes.

What a lot of the other rankings do

is they look at the input.

So how many kids are coming in

who are valedictorians?

How high are the SAT scores?

What are the class rank of the incoming class?

But Journal readers I think wanna know

how well the education is gonna serve them,

and what the outputs are going to be.

Where will that student be after graduation?

- [Narrator] College rankings

are meant to serve as a starting point

for families considering their options.

But the relative ranking of any school

shouldn't be the final word

on whether it's right for every applicant.

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