<p>I was wondering if there are any sources of historical college rankings. Perhaps these would provide some perspective on how colleges have moved in recent years, and whether or not they are likely to maintain their prestige.</p>
<p>The USNWR rankings have changed somewhat over the years but that is because of the way that USNWR kept changing the weighting of the different factors at the beginning. When they first came out, Stanford was #1. Also some colleges jumped from #8 to #15 to #22 to #18 during the first few years. This was used to criticize the USNWR rankings since people rightfully said that any ranking that could change a school's position that much from year to year wasn't really measuring the quality of the school since that was pretty constant from year to year, or decade to decade. I wouldn't take the USNWR rankings too seriously. The overall effect of USNWR has been to add more schools to the top tier that most people had not heard of before USNWR made them famous, but the rankings are limited for the detail work of chosing a college for an individual.</p>