A college diploma is not always enough these days to launch students into the career of their dreams with the financial independence they’ve been envisioning. So, students about to embark on their higher education journey might want to do some research to identify the top colleges based on cost of attendance, graduation rate, typical debt and predicted job salary upon graduation.
Fortunately, Money Magazine undertakes this task each year and has recently named 42 colleges to its 5-star list. This includes all eight Ivy League institutions: Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania and Yale.
Also named are five Massachusetts schools, in addition to Harvard: Amherst, Babson, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Wellesley and Williams, along with two others in the Northeast, specifically Bowdoin in Maine and Baruch College in New York.
Heading south, the list includes the University of Virginia, Washington and Lee University in Virginia, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Duke University in North Carolina, the Georgia Institute of Technology, Berea College in Kentucky and Vanderbilt University in Tennessee.
Colleges in the Midwest that made the list include Washington University in St. Louis, the University of Notre Dame, the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the University of Michigan and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
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Twelve schools in California are on the list: the California Institute of Technology, California State University, Fresno; California State University, Long Beach; California State University, Los Angeles; California State University, San Bernardino; California State University, Stanislaus; San Jose State University; Stanford University; the University of California, Berkeley; the University of California, Davis; the University of California, Irvine; and the University of California, San Diego.
Finally, Rice University in Texas closes Money’s list of the Top 42.
One factor that may be evident is that these colleges are, for the most part, quite selective. Students really need to engage early in high school, take a competitive course load, earn top grades and gain experience in activities that demonstrate knowledge of and commitment to the field they intend to pursue in college.
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By being fully prepared to undertake a rigorous college curriculum, students have the best chance of gaining acceptance to these colleges that have the ability to position them for long-term success.
