High schoolers are sweating. Parents are fretting. It’s that time of year again.

College application season unofficially begins today with the release of U.S. News & World Report’s widely discussed (and sometimes maligned) rankings of the nation’s top universities and liberal arts schools.

For New York, where college admissions can be an obsession, there is good news on the local front. Both of the city’s major universities inched upward in this year’s version of the popular list.

Columbia University clocked in at ninth among national universities, rising two spots from last year. Its downtown rival, New York University, ranked 32nd, up three spots from 35th. Farther uptown, Fordham University in the Bronx ranked 70th. SUNY-Binghamton was the highest-ranked public school in the state, at 74th.

Harvard University and Princeton University topped the list, tying for first place for the second year in a row.

Columbia also ranked highly on the magazine’s “Great schools, great values” list. At 7th place, the Morningside Heights school has 41% of its students receiving scholarship grants based on financial need. NYU did not make the list, but it was cited for a commendable study-abroad program.

Overall, this year’s rankings saw little change. The Ivy League contributed six of the top ten national universities, while Williams College and Amherst College remained atop of the liberal arts college list. U.S. News divides its rankings into categories of comparable schools.

Ryan Fogarty, a Long Island 18-yearold, is headed to NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts in the fall. He said he would prefer the rankings be more specialized, since students are often looking for universities that fit their unique interests.

“They don’t break them up into enough categories,” Mr. Fogarty said. “They should break schools down according to what they’re strongest in.”

The U.S. News rankings are determined by calculating a variety of factors. Peer assessment, student-retention rates, and faculty resources are the highest weighted factors. Admissions yield – the number of students accepted who decide to attend – has been discontinued as a factor in the rankings, after critics complained it biased colleges toward early decision admissions programs.

Other schools in the magazine’s 2004-05 list of top 10 universities were: Yale University, University of Pennsylvania, Duke University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, California Institute of Technology, and Dartmouth College.