T
he colleges on Forbes’ annual Top Colleges list offer a first-rate education at a great price, prepare students for high-paying careers and graduate some of the most successful entrepreneurs and leaders in public service, science and technology. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, our top college this year, accomplishes all of this and more.
Graduates of the private college in Cambridge, Massachusetts, go on to become big earners; the median salary for an MIT graduate six years after graduation is $98,100. Ten years after graduation, the typical MIT graduate brings home $173,700. Few MIT students—only 8%—take on student loan debt to attend the college, and those that do pay down their loans quickly. Each year, more than 200 graduates go on to earn a Ph.D. On the Forbes American Leaders list, which measures the leadership and entrepreneurial success of a college’s graduates, 56 people are MIT alumni.
The other colleges at the top of our list—the University of California at Berkeley, Stanford University, Princeton University and Columbia University—boast similar numbers. Noticeably absent from Forbes’ top ten this year is Harvard University, the Ivy League institution that from 2017 to 2019 reigned at the top of the rankings.
We kept our methodology consistent with last year, which allows us to make direct comparisons to our previous list. These comparisons help us better understand why Harvard and some of its Ivy League peers dropped in our rankings. We also looked at what’s causing public universities to stand out and how some small private colleges have worked their way up the list.
Harvard doesn’t stack up to Forbes’ list leaders on a couple of measures. The first is retention rate. Several of the Ivy League universities saw steep declines in their retention rate during the fall 2020 semester—a term that began in the throes of the Covid-19 pandemic, when most classes were held online. Many returning undergraduates opted to take a leave of absence, and federal visa restrictions kept international students off campus.
According to the latest federal data, only 76% of former freshmen returned to Harvard for their second year in the fall 2020, bringing the university’s otherwise impressive three-year average retention rate to about 90%, from 98% last year. Fellow Ivy Leaguer Yale University, which dropped six spots in our rankings this year, also saw its retention rate take a nosedive to 65% in fall 2020 from 99% the prior year. Princeton University (No. 4) had 83% of its former freshmen return that fall.
By comparison, MIT—which routinely has one of the highest retention rates of any college in the U.S.—retained 98% of its new sophomores in fall 2020. The college’s three-year average retention rate held steady at around 99%. In fall 2020, 96% of former freshmen returned to the University of California at Berkeley (No. 2) and 97% to Rice University (No. 12).
On top of pandemic-worn retention rates, Harvard scored poorly on Forbes’ Pell index. Looking at outcomes for Pell Grant recipients is something Forbes incorporated last year, and it gives us insight into how well a college prepares and graduates low-income students. In addition, we reward colleges that enroll a greater proportion of low-income students in order to identify which colleges best serve as engines of economic mobility. To create the Pell index—which makes up for 5% of our ranking model—we multiply the six-year graduation rate for Pell Grant recipients by the percentage of Pell Grant recipients at the institution.
The problem is not that low-income students who attend Harvard are not successful—they are. The university’s six-year Pell graduation rate is 97%—just one percentage point lower than the rate for all students—and Harvard scored in the top percentile on the price-to-earnings premium, a measure developed by the think tank Third Way to calculate the return on investment for students at a particular college.
But compared to other institutions in the Ivy League—and many of the other colleges on our list—Harvard doesn’t enroll many Pell Grant recipients, meaning that the advantages that come with a Harvard degree are available to relatively few low-income students. During the 2020-21 academic year, only 11% of undergraduate students at the university received Pell Grants. Of Forbes’ top 25 colleges, Harvard is tied with the University of Chicago for the lowest proportion of Pell students enrolled. By comparison, 21% of undergraduates at Princeton, 18% of undergraduates at Yale, 16% of undergraduates at Dartmouth and 13% of undergraduates at Brown University receive Pell Grants. At the average college on our list, one in four students receives a Pell Grant.
While the Ivy League universities have moved down Forbes’ list, several large public universities have risen in our ranks. Public colleges filled 5 of our top 25 spots this year, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Michigan State University, the University of Kansas and Texas Tech University each rose at least 10 spots on our list. Mississippi State University and the New Jersey Institute of Technology made remarkable leaps on our list, moving up 132 and 114 spots, respectively.
Public colleges and universities score particularly well on our debt and percent-borrowed variables, showing that generally fewer students take out student loans to attend public colleges and those that do graduate with less debt. Public institutions—and especially California State University system colleges—also rank very highly on the Pell index, giving them a significant boost over most private colleges. For example, California State University at Dominguez Hills (No. 309) would be in the twentieth spot if Forbes only considered the Pell index in its rankings.
The 2022 list also includes a few newcomers to the Forbes rankings, such as the Fashion Institute of Technology and the University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez. Several colleges that earned a spot on Forbes’ rankings in previous years have returned to the list, including the College of Idaho, the University of Colorado Colorado Springs, and the University of Washington, Bothell.
For the full coverage of the Forbes Top Colleges list, click here.
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