Princeton University took first place in the WSJ/College Pulse ranking of U.S. colleges for the second year in a row. But there are plenty of new schools in the upper echelon of the ranking.
Half of the colleges in the top 50 this year are new, with a wide range of schools—large and small, public and private, technical and liberal arts—serving their students especially well and leaving them broadly satisfied with their college experience.
Our ranking measures how well each college sets graduates up for financial success. We look at how much a school improves students’ chances of graduating and their future earnings, balancing these outcomes with feedback from students on college life. We don’t measure reputation, or the college’s own finances.
Public schools are prominent among those that climbed the ranking this year, with two in the top 10—the University of California, Berkeley at No. 8 and the Georgia Institute of Technology at No. 9—and six in the top 20. No public school was in the top 10 last year and only two were in the top 20.
Schools with strong tech or business programs also fared well, including No. 2 Babson College and No. 3 Stanford University. Stanford is one of 17 California colleges in the top 50, up from six last year and by far the most for any state.
Yale University and Claremont McKenna College round out the top five, in that order, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at No. 6, Harvard University at No. 7, and Davidson College at No. 10 fill out the top 10. In all, 500 colleges are ranked.
The colleges in this ranking have found many ways to set their students up to succeed. To name just a few: Some schools have extensive, highly engaged alumni networks that ease graduates’ career paths; some work extensively with area businesses to put students in real-world environments before graduation; and some have developed in-classroom curricula that can adapt to the changing array of skills most desirable in the labor market.
The value of networks
The No. 1 college in the country, Princeton, scored well across all of the ranking’s major components. Its graduation rate is the highest of any school in the ranking, and it eclipses almost every other school in setting up students for financial success later in life, factors that makeup 70% of each college’s overall score.
Career preparation starts early at Princeton and is deeply connected to the school’s influential alumni network. Just months after arriving on campus, Princeton students can apply for a “Princeternship,” a brief internship and job-shadowing opportunity over their first winter break. The program gives students an early opportunity to explore career paths, gain real-world experience, and build relationships with alumni hosts.
Kimberly Betz, the executive director of Princeton’s Center for Career Development, says the school’s alumni network plays a critical role in helping students explore opportunities that align with their interests. As one indication of graduates’ lasting connection to the school, reunions draw “mind-boggling” numbers of alumni to campus, Betz says. “It’s just astonishing how many people show up for those things.”
Rose Weathers, a sophomore at Princeton, interned this summer at WestBridge Capital, an investment firm co-founded by a Princeton graduate. “I’ve reached out to a few alums in fields I’m interested in, and almost every single one has responded and agreed to meet with me,” she says. Karel Kalas, a rising senior, says his summer career-development program in Washington, D.C., included more than a dozen events with alumni.
Networking, especially with alumni, is one of the most important things college students and recent graduates can do to help start their careers, says Dawn Fay, operational president at Robert Half, a workplace consulting and recruiting firm. “Don’t be shy,” she says. “There’s so much power in an individual that went to the same school as you did.”
Real-world experience
At second-ranked Babson College, the emphasis on hands-on experiences begins the moment students step on campus as freshmen. Built into the Babson curriculum are opportunities for experiential learning, like the mandatory Foundations of Management and Entrepreneurship class, where students launch startups in groups during their first two semesters of college using a loan of up to $3,000 provided by the school.
Among other things, the class teaches students how to deal with the unexpected challenges any new business is likely to face. Sophomore Jillian Chinchillo served as her team’s CEO last year and had to navigate pivoting her company’s waterproofing shoe-wax business when the group realized their product wasn’t working as intended. Another group in last year’s cohort needed to develop a new sales strategy on the fly after a supply-chain issue in China threw them off course, depleting their product supply on an important sales day.
“It is not a simulation,” says Ethan Ide, a junior at Babson. “You’re working with international suppliers, and you have a website, and you’re selling to people across the globe. Getting that hands-on experience from day one was kind of insane.”
Babson has long been associated with entrepreneurship, but in recent years, the college’s president, Stephen Spinelli, has pushed to ensure that it is graduating not just entrepreneurs, but also what he calls “entrepreneurial leaders”—people entering the workforce who are more likely to pioneer new initiatives within broader organizations.
“In the context of your education, you’ll have the tools and understanding that you can use to identify problems, look at business models, see how to create value,” Spinelli says of the Babson curriculum.
Building marketable skills
Schools with historically strong technical and engineering programs also did especially well in the ranking this year, in part because of strong industry demand for those skills. “The trend has been fairly persistent for the last decade or so for more technical skills, more analytical skills” to be in demand, says Ken Kring, co-managing director of Korn Ferry’s global education practice.
Ava Maalouf graduated from Georgia Tech earlier this year with a degree in chemical engineering. Maalouf, who started college as a music major at nearby Georgia State University, says she received four or five internship offers every year she was at Georgia Tech and recently had her pick of seven full-time job offers. “Getting so many job offers made the difficulty of the program super worth it,” she says.
Colleges in general are increasingly adapting their in-classroom programs to match the demand for a changing set of skills. No. 11 Bentley University began offering a finance and technology major last year, which features classes that prepare students to apply AI tools in financial environments. Kevin Aprea Cabrera, a junior, is pursuing the fintech major and says talking about his experiences in classes helped him land his internship at PricewaterhouseCoopers this summer. And this year, No. 29 Rice University is launching new degree options in operations research to align with the growth of that field. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects a growth of 23% in employment of operations research analysts from 2023 to 2033.
New entrants
This year we expanded our ranking to include an additional 100 schools that either didn’t rank among the top 400 last year or hadn’t had enough responses to the survey of students and recent graduates that accounts for 25% of a college’s overall score. Every college included in the ranking received a minimum of 50 survey responses, with most receiving more than 100.
In all, tens of thousands of survey responses are factored into the ranking. The Wall Street Journal and College Pulse, a college-focused survey and research firm, asked dozens of questions on topics covering student life, career preparation, and the quality of classrooms, dining halls, and sports facilities. This year, the survey introduced new questions focused on the extent to which the colleges develop character strengths that help students make a meaningful contribution to society, including moral courage, resilience, and fairness.
This year’s ranking also features a finer-tuned model for calculations related to how much colleges boost their students’ graduation rates and salaries. The new model was developed with input from data scientists at Statista.
Making the decision
With faith in higher education continuing to slide and colleges making headlines this year for on-campus protests, the investment in a college degree has come under increased scrutiny. As such, the WSJ/College Pulse ranking seeks to reward institutions that showcase demonstrable positive outcomes for their students and alumni.
However, viewing higher education through this lens may not be best for everyone. The best school for any particular student might be one that’s close to family or friends, offers a particular program of study, or matches their values—factors that can’t be analyzed in any one ranking.