America’s Top Colleges 2026: How To Choose A College In Trump’s America

Forbes

Forbes Education Reporter Emma Whitford joins Forbes Talks to talk about the new Forbes’ 2026 Top Colleges list. They discuss how a drop in international students paying full tuition could hurt the financial aid provided to domestic students, especially at smaller liberal arts colleges that rely on this revenue. They also cover the importance of return on investment and graduate salaries as key metrics for ranking schools.   Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawhitford/2025/08/26/how-forbes-ranks-americas-best-colleges/  Subscribe to FORBES: https://www.youtube.com/user/Forbes?sub_confirmation=1  Fuel your success with Forbes. Gain unlimited access to premium journalism, including breaking news, groundbreaking in-depth reported stories, daily digests and more. Plus, members get a front-row seat at members-only events with leading thinkers and doers, access to premium video that can help you get ahead, an ad-light experience, early access to select products including NFT drops and more:  https://account.forbes.com/membership/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=display&utm_campaign=growth_non-sub_paid_subscribe_ytdescript  Stay Connected Forbes newsletters: https://newsletters.editorial.forbes.com Forbes on Facebook: http://fb.com/forbes Forbes Video on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/forbes Forbes Video on Instagram: http://instagram.com/forbes More From Forbes:  http://forbes.com  Forbes covers the intersection of entrepreneurship, wealth, technology, business and lifestyle with a focus on people and success.

Transcript

00:00Hi, everybody. I'm Brittany Lewis, a reporter here at Forbes. Joining me now is my Forbes

00:08colleague, Emma Whitford, who covers education. Emma, thanks so much for joining me.

00:14Thanks so much for having me, Brittany.

00:16This past year has been challenging for higher education in this country, to say the least.

00:21Colleges and universities have been subject to funding cuts, student visas have been revoked,

00:26and there have been drastic changes to student loan policies. Forbes recently distrapped its top

00:32colleges list. So, A, a big congrats to you, but B, can you give us an overview of this list,

00:39especially in the context of the tumultuous time that these universities have faced?

00:44Yeah, it's important to note that our data is mostly federal, so it's always a couple of years

00:51behind. I like to think of the list this year as sort of a snapshot in time for where colleges

00:57stood right before Trump took office. There weren't any big surprises and changes to the rankings.

01:03There was a pretty even split between the number of public and private universities that made our

01:08top 500. MIT is number one. They reclaimed the title they had in 2022, and the University of California

01:16schools continued to perform really well. Berkeley, UCLA, and San Diego all made the top 20 this year.

01:24And as you said, MIT did reclaim that top spot, and it knocked out Princeton. Princeton had it.

01:30Princeton is now this year at number four. What does that movement signify to you? What does that

01:36really mean? Does that tell you anything larger? Yeah, our list tends to have quite a bit of movement

01:42year to year because we are comparing the schools against each other on all 14 of our metrics.

01:48So competition is really close among even the top 100 schools. We almost always have a new number one

01:55from the previous year. I wouldn't read too much into Princeton's drop to number four. It's still ranked

02:00very highly in the top five. It just means that MIT sort of had the edge on some variables that Princeton

02:07didn't. For example, no one really compares MIT when it comes to postgraduate salaries, even for early

02:14and mid-career graduates. MIT, Princeton, other universities, they're all household names. I want

02:22to talk about one maybe lesser known college that made the top 10. Williams College is a small liberal

02:29arts school that cracked the top 10 for the first time this year. Does that reflect a larger trend? Talk to

02:35us about that placement. Yeah, there's been a handful of elite non-Ivy League liberal arts colleges that are

02:44getting a lot more attention lately because the Ivy League itself is drawing a lot of criticism.

02:49Williams is one of those schools. It's been a really great school for a long time, but they're starting

02:55to show us now that they can compete with the Ivies when evaluated on things like graduate salaries,

03:00student debt, return on investment, and alumni influence. The Trump administration has cut federal

03:06funding to a host of different universities all across the country, and we know that the impacts

03:11there will mostly be felt by graduate programs. I am curious, though, will undergraduate schools

03:17with a strong emphasis on research, will they feel those cuts, too? Are they vulnerable?

03:23Yeah, any school that receives any federal money for research is going to feel an impact from those cuts.

03:29Undergraduate-only schools tend to focus more so on teaching and less on research, so they might

03:36not be reliant on the federal funding in a way that a school like Johns Hopkins University is reliant on it.

03:43I wouldn't go as far to say that the undergraduate schools are safe. They're still being hit from so many

03:49different angles, but they may be less impacted by these cuts specifically.

03:54And we've heard of some colleges on our list, like Stanford and Northwestern, laying off hundreds of

04:01its staff and then citing Trump's policies and the federal funding cuts as reasons to why those

04:06layoffs did occur. And I'm thinking of the longer-term implications here. Do we expect the rankings of

04:12these institutions to suffer at all because of those losses?

04:16I think it will definitely have an impact. Layoffs will degrade programs and that will

04:23impact outcomes in the long run. But it will take quite a while for the layoffs and those changes to

04:29reflect in the data that we use. Because like I said before, we're relying on federal numbers that

04:34tend to lag a couple of years. And then a lot of our metrics have really long time horizons. So if we're

04:40looking at something like graduate salary, 20 years post-grad, it will take 20 years for the students of

04:47today to sort of be shown in those numbers. So it will have an impact. We may not see it for a little

04:53bit in the rankings.

04:54And President Trump, as we've talked about, has really battled with top universities in this second term.

05:01He's accused some of liberal bias. He's criticized DEI practices. I'm curious if you think there's going

05:09to see and if we're in an age now where politics really influences decision-making here and influences

05:17where students want to go. Yeah, for some students it definitely does. I've been talking over the last

05:23couple of weeks with college admission counselors that are working with, you know, high school students

05:29deciding where they want to go. And they're hearing from their progressive students that they really

05:34don't want to attend college in states like Florida or Texas, even if the school itself is not

05:41conservative. They just don't want to be in those areas. And then on the flip side, conservative students

05:46who are worried about more liberal student bodies or want a more balanced sort of campus culture, they're

05:55looking to schools like Emory, Duke, Vanderbilt, and Dartmouth, which are all really great institutions, but

06:03aren't as politically charged right now as like Harvard and Columbia are.

06:08And we know that President Trump and the Trump administration has curbed some international

06:13students from attending college here. Has the decline in international student enrollment or even the

06:19fear of visas being impacted, will that impact rankings or do you expect that to impact rankings in the

06:26future? And have you seen since you've been doing this list, since you've been working in education at

06:32Forbes policy and politics really impacting colleges and decision making in the past like it has been

06:41now? I would say it's definitely unprecedented now. Schools have never had to deal with so many

06:48different threats to their funding from the federal government before. International students is a really

06:56big one. As with everything else, it's not quite reflected in our rankings yet, but any school that

07:03has a large population of undergraduate students that are from outside the U.S. will really struggle

07:09if they can't fill those seats. In part because international students don't usually receive financial

07:15aid from the colleges, so they pay full tuition. And the schools rely on that full tuition to then offer

07:21financial aid to domestic students. So they can't even if the international students go away, they

07:28can't necessarily recruit more domestic students because there is a shrinking population of college

07:33age people in the United States. So it's sort of lost revenue to some degree if they can't come over to

07:40the U.S. And that will really hurt a lot of schools. And I think that that's kind of lost in the

07:47conversation. The fact that if an international student comes here pays full price, that's also

07:53actually helping a domestic student right here in America. You said this could impact a lot of

07:59universities. What universities are going to be impacted here? Are they top universities like Harvard? Is it

08:05more mixed around? What does that really look like? Yeah, the top universities have other cushions they can

08:13fall on. I mean, you see cited all the time, how big their endowments are, like Harvard's got 53 billion

08:20dollars, which, depending on who you ask, is a ton of money, or you know, they can't access all of it. But they

08:29will be fine, you know, they will always be able to find a new way to make up that revenue. But a lot of the

08:35smaller colleges, liberal arts colleges that have somewhere between 500 and 3000 students, if they

08:42have significant foreign populations, so anywhere between like 15 to 50%, that's really, really going

08:50to hurt. I know we've spent some time in this conversation talking about the top 10. You've said

08:56that there's movement almost every year, there's a new number one. I'm curious about the middle and bottom

09:03of the list because there's 500 colleges and universities on this list. Where are you seeing

09:07the most movement here? Are there any public schools, perhaps a non-IV, that's making a name for itself?

09:15Yeah, there's tons of movement all the way up and down the list. Some of the things that jumped out to

09:21me right away were the University of California Santa Cruz moved up quite a bit. They're now at spot

09:26number 63. It's a great campus. It just reflects sort of the continued strength of the University of

09:32California system. Harvey Mudd College, which is one of the Claremont colleges in California. There's

09:38seven of them. It moved up to spot 84. Then there were a handful of schools, Occidental College in LA,

09:46George Mason University in Virginia, and Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas. They all

09:52moved around 100 spots. So now they sit between the 100 to 200 range. And thankfully, there were a lot

09:59more big jumps like that than big falls, which is always really nice to see. Emma, I can't imagine

10:06the undertaking that this is. I mean, this is a massive project. A list of 500 colleges or universities,

10:13and you're ranking them based on a host of criteria. But why do we do the top 500 list? Why is that number so big?

10:21Well, I always wanted to make sure students have all kinds of options. I mean, it's very stressful

10:31to apply to college these days. And it's getting more stressful because admissions rates at the top

10:3610, 20, 50 schools are just getting smaller and smaller. And we really want to highlight that there's,

10:41you know, more schools out there. There's 500 excellent schools out there in the United States where

10:47students can attend. Emma, I appreciate all of the work here you did on this list. I always like seeing

10:54where I went to school on here and how it moves every year. And I'm sure our audience does the same.

11:00Emma, thanks so much for joining me. Of course. Thank you for having me.

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