The 2025 Best Colleges in the U.S.
The Wall Street Journal/College Pulse ranking includes 25 new colleges in the top 50 this year.
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, nor 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 the far the most for any state.
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