Forbes Top Colleges 2021

The nuts-and-bolts underlying our annual list of the best schools.

By Christian Kreznar



The Schools

We first selected colleges and universities that educate undergraduates, based on their Carnegie Classification, a higher education framework that categorizes schools by their degree offerings, research output and specialty focus. We selected doctoral research universities, master’s universities and colleges and baccalaureate colleges. We also included colleges that provide specialized four-year programs in engineering, business and art.



From that pool we drew schools that had sufficient data from the following sources: The College Scorecard and the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), two federal databases that track student outcomes and institutional characteristics. We also drew from PayScale, a salary reporting and comparison company; Third Way, a D.C.-based think tank that developed the Price-to-Earnings Premium; and the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES). We cut schools with fewer than 300 total undergraduates.





Alumni Salary (20%)

We used two data points from the College Scorecard and two from PayScale. From the College Scorecard, we included salary figures from 6 and 10 years after enrollment. From PayScale, we included early and mid-career earnings, which span the 1-4 years and 10 years after graduation respectively. (Beyond 10 years there are too many confounding variables to link income to higher education.)



Neither the College Scorecard nor PayScale data sets are perfect: College Scorecard only tracks recipients of federal funding using IRS data, while PayScale data is self-reported. We weighed all four salary variables equally at 5% to account for each measure’s shortcomings.



Debt (15%)

From the College Scorecard, we multiplied the average federal student loan debt per borrower by the percentage of students who had taken out federal student loans. We also used College Scorecard data for five-year loan repayment rates. Both of these variables were weighed at 7.5%, for a total of 15%.



Return On Investment (15%)

Third Way provided the Price-to-Earnings Premium for each institution, which measures how long it takes students to pay their college costs. It does this by dividing the total net price of obtaining a college degree by the post-enrollment earnings boost that students get compared to the typical salary of a high school graduate in their state according to Census data. This gets at the true financial ROI of a college education. We weighed the general premium at 10%, and a separate premium for low-income graduates at 5%, for a total of 15%.



Graduation Rate (15%)

While a four-year college education remains the gold standard, it doesn’t reflect the large number of students who need more time for personal and financial reasons. Rather than only accounting for first-time, full-time students, this year we incorporated the completion outcomes of part-time and transfer students as well. We used IPEDS’s data on six-year completion rates, with 10% slated for all students and 5% for students who received Pell Grants. We also indexed the Pell graduation rates with the proportion of Pell students at each institution, giving an advantage to schools that both enroll and graduate those from low- and moderate-income backgrounds.



Forbes American Leaders List (15%)

To assess the leadership and entrepreneurship of their graduates, we compiled how many listmakers each school produced on the Forbes 30 Under 30, Forbes 400, Richest Self-Made Women and Most Powerful Women lists. We also included individuals in public service, including members of the Presidential cabinet, Supreme Court, Congress and sitting governors. Finally, the list included winners of the MacArthur Fellowship, Nobel Prize, Breakthrough Prize, Lasker Prize, Fields Prize, Academy Awards, Oscars, Tony’s, NAACP Awards, Guggenheim Fellowship, major sport all-stars, Presidential Medals and Pulitzer Prizes.