Willamette University will be classified as a National University for the first time in U.S. News & World Report’s annual college rankings this fall, recognizing the institution’s growth and evolution as a major comprehensive university. After debuting in the very first U.S. News rankings in 1983 as the top ranked regional university in the West, Willamette has spent forty years in the National Liberal Arts College category. Willamette University was the only institution promoted from the National Liberal Arts College list to the National University list.
The reclassification, announced by U.S. News earlier this year, reflects Willamette’s intentional strategy over the past fifteen years to broaden both its graduate and undergraduate program offerings to better serve the needs of its students and the region — building on the liberal arts education that has defined the university for over 184 years.
The oldest university in the western United States, Willamette now comprises five distinct colleges and schools: Willamette College, its historic residential liberal arts college in Salem; the School of Law, Oregon’s first law school; the Atkinson Graduate School of Management, named the best MBA in the state; Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, the state’s flagship art and design school, which joined Willamette in 2021; and the new School of Computing and Information Sciences, home of the best master’s in data science program in the Pacific Northwest.
“This reclassification validates the exciting path we’ve been on for years and the progress we are making,” said Steve Thorsett, president of Willamette University. “We are earning national attention for the innovative ways we are connecting our undergraduate students in our liberal arts college and our art and design school with access to a broad range of graduate and professional programs.”
Thorsett also noted, “The liberal arts are, and will remain, the heart of a Willamette education. We haven’t changed our mission or our priorities. We’ve simply outgrown a classification that no longer describes our breadth or our ambitions. This reclassification reflects everything we’ve built around that enduring core: small class sizes, meaningful faculty-student relationships, and a close-knit academic community.”
The National University category contains many of the nation’s best known public and private universities, including other mid-sized institutions that share Willamette’s commitment to a strong undergraduate liberal arts core, such as the University of Rochester, Case Western Reserve University, William and Mary, and Wake Forest University. Regional peers in this category include the large state research universities and Gonzaga University, Seattle University, and Pacific University, which is currently working with Willamette to create a new merged institution that would be the largest and most comprehensive independent university in Oregon.
Last fall, U.S. News announced that they were modifying their framework for grouping colleges into ranking categories, motivated by the American Council on Education's release of the new 2025 Carnegie Classification system.
