The dirty secret is that the reason the US News & World Report list changes every year is that they change the criteria (or relative weights of the criteria) every year. The key data doesn’t change very much, but if they published the same list every year, no one would buy the new magazine. Since different colleges will be better for different people, there’s no reason to take anything in these lists too seriously – it’s mostly true that the quality of students and faculty at the top schools on these lists is higher than at the ones further down, but some people might be better off at school number 25 than school number 1.

US news and world report provides the most comprehensive list of top colleges in the US. I believe for the most part it is accurate. It decides ranking based on several criteria.

Here’s a link to the US News and World Report list:

http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/usnews/edu/college/rankings/rankindex_brief.php

Some of this is opinion. So using the word ACCURATE is misleading. Different people will have different opinions of which schools are best.