Long gone are the days when name recognition was enough to lure aspiring high school graduates.
Kids today aren't simply looking for party colleges - though Syracuse University undergrads may disagree - and they surely aren't searching for more expensive options, not when seven in 10 alumni carry average student loan debts of $35,000 per borrower.
That's a $2,000 increase from 2014 and a about a $7,000 jump from two years ago. Even adjusting for inflation, it's still more than double what borrowers were burdened in the 90s. This is what makes college students today wonder if a degree is worth the cost, and whether institutions are sensitive to their financial needs.
In their eight year ranking the nation's top colleges, Forbes found colleges are focusing on keeping students in school rather than solely looking for marketing prestige. Renowned universities like Williams College (No. 2), Brown (No. 8), and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (No. 10) are still coveted educational havens, but all-around emphasis is being placed on what they offer to the common pupil. Similarly, instead of focusing on what made students want to attend, Forbes analyzed what is keeping them from dropping out.
Their methodology included student satisfaction, student to faculty ratio, financial aid options, acceptance rate, and tuition cost versus family finances.
This year's top ranked school is Pomona College located in Claremont, Calif. Established in 1887 - a fact that also contributed to students' reasons for staying - this private liberal arts college offers financial assistance to 68 percent of its 1,610 undergraduates; full-timers receive grants of about $35,988.
While Pomona College only accepted 14 percent of fall 2014 applicants, the University of California, Los Angeles (No. 45) led all 72.676 applications received. Stanford (No. 3) and Harvard (No. 6) shared the distinction of accepting the nation's lowest number of incoming freshmen among top 10 schools.
Aside from finding most people want to be educated along either East or West coasts, the survey found few transfer out. The lowest retention rate within top colleges belonged to Pennsylvania's Swarthmore College (No. 7) at 96 percent and Wesleyan University (No. 17) in Connecticut with 95 percent.
Check out the top ten ranked schools below, and take a look at the complete 650-college list of America's top institutions here.
- 1. Pomona College (California)
- 2. Williams College (Massachusetts)
- 3. Stanford (California)
- 4. Princeton (New Jersey)
- 5. Yale (Connecticut)
- 6. Harvard (Massachusetts)
- 7. Swarthmore College (Pennsylvania)
- 8. Brown (Rhode Island)
- 9. Amherst College (Massachusetts)
- 10. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Massachusetts)