US News & World Report has released its university rankings

After months of tumult on American college campuses, relative stability returned to one area Tuesday, when U.S. News & World Report released its oft-maligned but closely watched rankings.

Many top schools were in the same or similar positions as they were a year ago.

Among national universities, Princeton again ranked first, followed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard. Stanford, which tied for third last year, fell to fourth. U.S. News again judged Williams College to be the best among national liberal arts colleges. Spelman College was named the nation’s top historically black institution, while the University of California, Los Angeles, ranked first among public universities.

Few franchises in American higher education are as controversial as the U.S. News rankings. Over the decades, their publisher has had to deal with issues related to manipulated data, complaints about obscure methodologies, accusations of retribution and the fundamental question of whether it is appropriate to rank universities.

For U.S. News, which shut down its print magazine in 2010, the rankings are a bastion of its largely defunct influence. They are also a source of millions of dollars each year, as universities pay licensing fees to promote their results. U.S. News, which insists that its business relationships with schools have no impact on the rankings, argues that it is performing a public service by distilling a chaotic college marketplace for weary consumers.

Indeed, for students and their parents, rankings can be tools to narrow college searches and status symbols surrounding admissions to certain schools. For college leaders, rankings are often publicly touted but privately loathed. For regulators, including Education Secretary Miguel A. Cardona, rankings are responsible for an “unhealthy obsession with selectivity” and the growth of the “false altar of U.S. News and World Report.”

And to almost everyone outside the American news industry, they are opaque and, ultimately, almost uniformly misunderstood.