The Massachusetts Institute of Technology topped Forbes’ 2026 ranking of America’s top colleges, a list that includes several schools affiliated with academic health systems.
Forbes’ “America’s Top Colleges” ranking, published Sept. 10, includes 500 four-year institutions. It evaluates schools using 14 data points, including graduation and retention rates, alumni salaries, the frequency with which graduates earn PhDs, prestigious fellowships and awards, and student debt and return on investment.
Data sources include the College Scorecard, the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, the NAACP, the MacArthur Foundation, the Fulbright U.S. Student Program and the Harry S. Truman Scholarship Foundation. Read more about the methodology here.
Several of the colleges in the top 10 are home to academic health systems, including Boston-based Mass General Brigham, Philadelphia-based Penn Medicine and Palo Alto, Calif.-based Stanford Medicine. Health system HR leaders have told Becker’s that workforce partnerships with academic institutions have remained a top priority to develop a stronger pipeline amid shortages.
Here are the top 25 colleges out of 500, per Forbes:
1. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, Mass.)
2. Princeton (N.J.) University
3. Harvard University (Cambridge, Mass.)
4. Columbia University (New York City)
5. University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia)
6. Stanford University (Stanford, Calif.)
7. California Institute of Technology (Pasadena, Calif.)
8. Yale University (New Haven, Conn.)
9. University of California, Berkeley
10. Vanderbilt University (Nashville, Tenn.)
11. Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore)
12. University of California, Los Angeles
13. Duke University (Durham, N.C.)
14. Cornell University (Ithaca, N.Y.)
15. Northwestern University (Evanston, Ill.)
16. Rice University (Houston)
17. University of Chicago
18. Brown University (Providence, R.I.)
19. Williams College (Williamstown, Mass.)
20. Dartmouth College (Hanover, N.H.)
21. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
22. University of California, San Diego
23. University of Notre Dame (Notre Dame, Ind.)
24. Bowdoin College (Brunswick, Maine)
25. Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh)
Read the full list of 500 here.
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