The 2025 “Best Colleges” edition of U.S. News & World Report places Ithaca College among the top institutions of its kind and gives it particularly good grades for teaching, value, and innovation.
Serving as a guide for students and their families considering their higher education choices, the annual U.S. News & World Report rankings evaluate colleges and universities using statistical measures that the publication believes reflect academic quality and graduate outcomes. The indicators include such factors as first-year student retention rates, graduation rates, student-faculty ratio, graduate indebtedness, graduate earnings, and peer assessment, which is a measure of how a school is regarded by top administrators at other institutions.
IC was ranked #15 for overall quality from among the 171 institutions considered in the Regional Universities in the North category.
Regional universities are schools that offer a broad scope of undergraduate degrees and some master’s degree programs, but few, if any, doctoral programs. Ithaca College offers doctoral degrees in physical therapy and occupational therapy. For this category, the rankings are divided into four regions — North, South, Midwest, and West.
In other rankings, Ithaca College was recognized as:
- #9 for Best Undergraduate Teaching, which identifies schools whose faculty and administrators are committed to teaching undergraduate students in a high-quality manner.
- #13 for Most Innovative Schools, signifying the institutions that are making cutting-edge developments in terms of curriculum, faculty, students, campus life, technology, or facilities.
- #16 for Best Value, a ranking of schools that are above average academically and cost considerably less than many other schools when the financial aid that they dispense in the form of need-based grants and scholarships is taken into account.
U.S. New & World Report joins other publications that have recently given Ithaca College high marks, as IC claimed the top spot on the BestColleges list of LGTBQ+ Friendly Colleges and was included in Princeton Review’s The Best 390 Colleges.
For more information on the U.S. News & World Report rankings, visit usnews.com/best-colleges.