National Universities are the big schools that conduct research and award doctorates. There are also master’s universities (by region), baccalaureate colleges, and liberal arts colleges.

The tier refers to how they each rank amongst the others in their group. There is no tier 1 and tier 2 – these are referred to as “top” and represented the top 50% of schools in the group. Tier 3 are the next 25% and tier 4 is the bottom 25%. Some schools are unranked entirely. That’s not below the tier 4, they simply weren’t ranked for some reason.

The top 5 national universities this year (2008) are:

1) Princeton

2) Harvard

3) Yale

4) Stanford

5) U Penn

5) Cal Institute of Technology