We’ve been quietly building Rankordered.com for about a year now. It’s a simple idea: let people vote between two colleges at a time, and use the Elo algorithm (the one used in chess rankings) to figure out where each school stands.

It hasn’t exactly gone viral—but we still believe in what we’re doing.

College rankings have always felt a bit disconnected. They’re often based on arbitrary criteria, vague formulas, and data that doesn’t always reflect real people’s experiences. So we decided to take a different route: crowdsourcing. It’s just you, a pair of schools, and a clean setup to say which one you’d pick.

Transparent, Real-Time Rankings

So far, we’ve collected 376 votes—not a huge number, but enough to start surfacing some early trends. The rankings update in real time based on the latest votes. We want to be transparent about how many votes we have received and how the Elo scores are calculated.

The more people who vote, the more accurate the rankings get. So if you like what we’re trying to build, please share it with a friend or two. It makes a real difference.

Top 10 Colleges (As of March 30, 2025)

Here’s where things stand right now:

1. Princeton University
2. Stanford University
3. Harvard University
4. MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
5. Brown University
6. Johns Hopkins University
7. UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles)
8. Wellesley College
9. Columbia University
10. Babson College

These rankings aren’t locked in—they’ll change as more people vote. But what you see here is the result of hundreds of real comparisons made by visitors who took a few moments to share their opinion.

Help Shape the Rankings

If you’ve ever looked at a college ranking list and thought, “Really?” — this is your chance to do something about it.

👉 Vote here
👉 Then share it with someone who might care.

Whether you’ve just discovered us or you’ve been quietly voting all year—thanks for being here.

— The Rankordered Team