Northwestern University dropped from seventh to a tie for ninth place in the U.S. News & World Report 2027 Best Colleges rankings released Tuesday, Sept. 22. The publication cautioned that methodology changes make direct year-over-year comparisons unreliable.

The University of Chicago also fell, sliding three places from sixth. The two schools now share the ninth-place slot with Johns Hopkins University, according to Evanston Now. Both remain the highest-ranked universities in Illinois and the Midwest, WTTW reported.

The shifts stem largely from a methodology change. U.S. News replaced its Graduate Indebtedness factor with a new Earnings by Major metric, which evaluates how much graduates earn four years after leaving school within specific academic disciplines. The measure draws on data from the U.S. Department of Education's College Scorecard and carries a 5% weight in the overall score, according to U.S. News' ranking methodology.

Eric Brooks, U.S. News' director of education data analysis, told MarketWatch the ranking changes are "the result of a tweak in the methodology U.S. News used to calculate the rankings," not a sign of major shifts in education quality at top schools.

The new metric helped push the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to the No. 1 spot for the first time since the 2012 edition, ending Princeton University's 15-year run at the top. MIT led the new Earnings by Major category.

The full top 10: MIT, Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Caltech and Stanford (tied for fifth), the University of Pennsylvania, Duke, and the three-way tie at ninth.

Student outcomes now account for more than half of a school's total score in the U.S. News formula. That category includes graduation rates, social mobility for low-income students and post-graduate earnings. Changes to the Carnegie Classification framework also moved roughly 20% of previously ranked institutions into different categories for 2027.

U.S. News lists Northwestern's tuition and fees at $73,062 and the University of Chicago's at $77,955. Northwestern's undergraduate enrollment stands at 9,039 students.

The next highest-ranked Illinois school is the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, which jumped two spots into a tie for 34th place.