The colleges on Forbes’ annual Top Colleges list offer a first rate education at 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, Mass., 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 percent—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. Fifty six people on Forbes American Leaders list, which measures the leadership and entrepreneurial success of a college’s graduates, are MIT alumni.
The other colleges at the top of our list—the University of California-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.
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