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ince 2008, Forbes has ranked America’s Top Colleges by focusing not on a college’s reputation, but on outcomes. How successful are its students academically and in their careers? How much student debt do they carry after graduation? How many go on to become leaders as measured by Forbes’ lists and other honors? In other words, what sort of return do students get from their investment of time and money? In more recent years, we’ve started giving extra credit to schools that produce strong outcomes for all students, including those from families with lower incomes.
To build this year’s list, we began with the universe of roughly 2,600 four-year universities and colleges in the United States. Using the government-run Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), which gathers data from every U.S. college and university, we narrowed the list down to around 1,600 public and not-for-profit schools for undergraduates, including baccalaureate colleges, master’s universities and colleges and doctoral universities, as well as specialized institutions focused on fields such as engineering, business and the arts.
We then evaluated those schools using data from IPEDS and the U.S. Department of Education’s College Scorecard, an online tool for comparing cost, graduation rates and student debt at the institutions. We also incorporated post-graduation earnings data from a new source this year, People Data Labs, a private research company that collects and analyzes workforce and salary data from 70 million companies worldwide. Other data sources included Third Way, a Washington, D.C.-based public policy think tank; the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics; and original Forbes research on leadership, major awards, academic achievement and other measures of post-graduate success.
Institutions that have announced plans to close, enroll fewer than 300 undergraduate students or are missing four or more of our ranking metrics were excluded from consideration. We also excluded the five federal military academies, which consistently perform well on many of our measures but operate under a fundamentally different educational model than the other institutions in our ranking.
Colleges were ranked using the following metrics:
Alumni Salary (20%)
To determine which colleges produce the highest-paid graduates, we used post-graduation earnings data from People Data Labs. PDL provided median salary data for graduates 3, 6, 10 and 20 years after graduation. To ensure a smooth transition because PDL was a new source of data for Forbes’ list, we blended last year’s salary metrics (a combination of information from the data company Payscale and the federal College Scorecard) with the new numbers from PDL to get a two-year average for median earnings at each post-graduation period. Each of the four salary measures was weighted equally at 5%, for a total of 20%.
Debt (15%)
We measured student debt using two variables from the College Scorecard. First, to create a debt-and-borrowing index, we multiplied the median federal loan debt per borrower by the percentage of students who borrowed federal loans at the college. The second variable measured each college’s five-year federal loan repayment rate, which is the percentage of graduates with federal student loans who had reduced their outstanding loan principal five years after they began repaying. Each variable was weighted equally at 7.5%, for a total of 15%.
Graduation Rate (15%)
Graduation rates were measured using each institution’s six-year graduation rate, which captures the outcomes of transfer students, part-time students and others whose path to a degree extends beyond the traditional four years. This measure accounted for 10% of a college’s overall score. The other 5% was based on the six-year graduation rate for Pell Grant recipients, a widely used measure of outcomes for lower-income students. To recognize colleges that both enroll and graduate larger shares of Pell students, we indexed each institution’s Pell graduation rate by the proportion of Pell Grant recipients in its undergraduate population.
Forbes American Leaders (15%)
One of the defining features of Forbes’ America’s Top Colleges ranking is its emphasis on students’ post-graduation achievements. We compiled the undergraduate alma maters of leaders in business, government, science, medicine, entertainment and public service. Our American Leaders data included individuals recognized on Forbes’ most recent lists such as the Forbes 400, Forbes 250: America’s Greatest Innovators, Forbes BLK 50, 30 Under 30 and Most Powerful Women. It also includes current members of the President’s Cabinet, the Supreme Court of the United States, Congress and sitting governors, along with recipients of major national and international honors such as the Nobel Prize, MacArthur Fellowship, Lasker Awards, Fields Medal, NAACP Image Awards, Guggenheim Fellowships and Pulitzer Prizes. This measure was weighted at 15%.
Return on Investment (15%)
To measure the financial value of different colleges’ degrees, Forbes used Third Way’s price-to-earnings premium, which compares the total net cost of completing a degree with the additional earnings graduates receive over their careers compared with the typical salary of a high school graduate in their state. This measure accounted for 10% of a college’s overall score. We also included Third Way’s price-to-earnings premium for low-income students, which was weighted at 5%.
Note: Third Way’s return-on-investment data is from 2024 because the newest federal data needed to update its calculations had not been released. Because these calculations tend not to change very much from year to year, we continued to use the most recent data available.
Retention Rate (10%)
Retention rate measures the percentage of first-year students who returned for their second year at the same college. (In other words, students who did not transfer after their freshman year.) Forbes used a three-year rolling average of schools’ 2022, 2023 and 2024 retention rates from IPEDS. That average was weighted at 10% of schools’ final score.
Academic Success (10%)
We measured academic success in two ways, each weighted at 5%. The first was the number of recent graduates from each institution who have received nationally competitive scholarships, including Fulbright, Goldwater, Rhodes and Truman scholarships. The second used data from the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics to measure the average number of alumni who earned a Ph.D. during the past three years (2022, 2023 and 2024), adjusted for each institution’s enrollment.
