<p>Brightfutureahead: The one list is National Universities and the second list is Liberal Arts Colleges. Colleges come in basically three types. Large public universities that have fantastic facilities and opportunities, and some disadvantages such as large class sizes in freshman year. Liberal Arts Colleges (LAC) that are much smaller (at least under 5000 students). LAC's concentrate on undergraduate education, have small class sizes, the professors know you by name, and a professor might invite you home for dinner. LAC's tend to try to find a niche such as humanities or science rather than try to offer broad programs in everything. The third type are small/mid-sized universities that combine a broad range of options with smaller size. Most of the bigname non-public schools are in this category.</p>
<p>USNWR decided that it was okay to compare Stanford to Harvard and rank them, but not okay to compare universities with LAC's. This is why there are two lists.</p>