POTSDAM -- U.S. News & World Report's 2012 rankings of "Best Colleges" has again placed Clarkson University in “tier one,” its top tier of national universities, with a ranking of 119, up five places from last year's ranking.

Clarkson is ranked 35 among what U.S. News calls best value schools, which attempts to take into account a school's academic quality, as indicated by its 2012 U.S. News Best Colleges ranking, and the 2010-2011 net cost of attendance for a student who receives the average level of need-based financial aid. The higher the quality of the program and the lower the cost, the better the deal.

Clarkson's supply chain management program was listed among the 20 best in the nation for the tenth consecutive year, ranked at 15 in supply chain management/logistics. Clarkson is among five private institutions in the ranking, along with MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Marquette, and the University of Pennsylvania.

Clarkson's undergraduate engineering program is ranked at 76 among U.S. News’s best undergraduate engineering programs whose highest degree is a doctorate.

Last year's average starting salary for all Clarkson graduates was $53,844, and one in five alumni is already a CEO or senior executive, according to Clarkson surveys.

Each year U.S. News surveys nearly 1,400 accredited four-year institutions for their annual "Best Colleges" issue. Schools in the "National Universities" category, like Clarkson, offer a full range of undergraduate majors, master's, and doctoral degrees. These colleges also are committed to producing ground-breaking research.