Education and Skills

The 25 best US colleges according to recruiters

Emmie Martin

We recently released our seventh-annual list of the 50 best colleges in America.

To create the list, we asked more than 1,000 Business Insider readers to weigh in on which schools best prepare students for success after graduation. We then combined those results with average SAT score and median starting salary (read the full methodology here).

When we filtered the results to only include responses from the 666 people who said they hire frequently, Harvard took the top spot on the list. Harvard was No. 3 on the full best colleges list.

MIT, the No. 1 school on our best colleges list, fell to second place here, and Stanford, the No. 2 school on the best colleges list, came in third.

However, despite these few shifts, the refined list didn’t differ dramatically from the complete one.

Additionally, survey-takers noted that business and engineering are the majors most likely to help students become successful after graduation, with 37% and 24.7% response rates, respectively.

Here are the 25 schools hiring managers say are the best in the US:

1. Harvard University

2. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

3. Stanford University

4. Yale University

5. Princeton University

6. Duke University

7. Columbia University

8. University of Pennsylvania

9. Dartmouth College

10. University of California at Berkeley

11. TIE: California Institute of Technology

11. TIE: Cornell University

13. University of Chicago

14. US Naval Academy

15. Northwestern University

16. Georgetown University

17. University of Michigan at Ann Arbor

18. University of Virginia

19. Johns Hopkins University

20. US Military Academy

21. Carnegie Mellon University

22. Brown University

23. New York University

24. University of Notre Dame

25. Boston College

This article is published in collaboration with Business Insider. Publication does not imply endorsement of views by the World Economic Forum.

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Author: Emmie is a lists and features reporter at Business Insider.

Image: Profile of students taking their seats for the diploma ceremony at Harvard University in Cambridge. REUTERS/Brian Snyder
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