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00:21Colleges and universities have been subject to funding cuts, student visas have been revoked,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