The Naval Academy maintained service-school bragging rights in the annual U.S. News Best Colleges rankings released Tuesday, taking top honors among public national liberal arts colleges.
The U.S. Military Academy finished second and the Air Force Academy completed the podium sweep for the 2017 edition. The schools ranked tied for 12th, tied for 19th and tied for 32nd, respectively, among all national liberal arts colleges — a category that rules out larger, research-oriented schools like most public universities and Ivy League stalwarts.
The 1-2-3 order of finish was the same as last year, when Navy ranked ninth overall, Army took 22nd and Air Force was 29th.
Williams College in Massachusetts took top honors in the liberal arts group. Other than Annapolis and West Point, no schools ranked ahead of the Air Force Academy had a yearly tuition estimate below $47,900.
Army and Navy tied for first in the report’s high school counselor rankings, which surveyed about 1,100 counselors nationwide on their liberal arts-school recommendations. Air Force was in a six-way tie for fourth place.
The USAFA scored top honors in aerospace engineering, but was behind West Point (fourth) and Annapolis (fifth) in the overall engineering rankings. The rankings include only schools where doctorates are not offered.
Princeton took top honors in the national university category. Massachusetts Institute of Technology took second, and also finished in the runner-up slot among large schools in the Best Colleges for Veterans list, edged out by Stanford and followed by Duke.
Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, ranked first among national liberal arts schools for veterans, beating out Connecticut’s Wesleyan University and Dickinson College in Pennsylvania. For a school to qualify, at least 20 students must be using GI Bill benefits; this would rule out the service academies, where students don’t pay tuition.
The Coast Guard Academy took first overall among public schools in the report’s northern region, edging out the Merchant Marine Academy.
