One Philly College Makes Forbes’ Top 10 List

But it's not Penn (though it was close). Here are all the local schools that made the Top 100.

Photo credit: Fritz Ward via Flickr.

Photo credit: Fritz Ward via Flickr.

Well, Forbes has published its 2015 list of the Top Colleges in the U.S., and it’s bound to cause some consternation among status-conscious grads hereabouts, given what New York Times columnist Frank Bruni has called these rankings’ “quasi-biblical power.” Alas, the only local school to crack the Top 10 was Swarthmore, weighing in at number seven. (True, Princeton stands in fourth place, but we can never quite decide whether it’s “local” or not.)

For the curious, here are the Top 10 in order: 1) Pomona College; 2) Williams College; 3) Stanford; 4) Princeton; 5) Yale; 6) Harvard; 7) Swarthmore; 8) Brown; 9) Amherst; and 10) MIT. In case you’re wondering, these are Forbes’s all-around rankings, based, it says, in this “new age of return-on-investment education,” on “outcomes.” Factors taken into account include low student debt, student satisfaction, and four-year graduation rate.

Other local schools in the top 100:

12) Penn

19) Haverford

53) Lafayette

58) Franklin and Marshall

64) Bryn Mawr

72) Villanova

74) Lehigh

87) Dickinson

If your alma mater didn’t make the list, never fear: You still have a shot at first place in the WHYY College Challenge. The next one should be coming along any day now. They always do.

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