Along with academic fit, cost, and career outcomes, students now need to consider the impact of the federal assault on research funding, foreign students and “woke” colleges.
There’s no sugar coating it: This is a particularly stressful time to be a high school student (or the parents of one) selecting a college. In addition to weighing academic fit, net cost (after school aid) and the career prospects of graduates, you need to consider a college’s financial condition and which of its programs might be at risk from a wave of cost-cutting that could become a tsunami.
Politics are increasingly a consideration, too, both in terms of how President Donald Trump’s assault on “woke” colleges, federal research funding and foreign students might affect a specific school and in terms of how comfortable a student (or parents) feel with a particular community or state in these polarized times.
“No Florida. No Texas.” That’s what veteran Atlanta-based college counselor Mark Stucker, founder of School Match 4U, has been hearing more often from progressive families. Even before Trump reclaimed the White House, they were turned off by those two states’ high-profile Republican governors and their meddling in state university affairs. Meanwhile, Stucker’s clients from Ohio, Texas and other red states worry about protests getting out of control on “woke” blue state campuses. While politics are playing a growing role, Stucker also neatly puts them in perspective: Over the last 15 years he has seen growing student interest in “football and fun and warm weather” and parental interest in whether, after college, students “will be gainfully employed with a good salary.’’
As we prepared Forbes’ new America’s Top Colleges list, we looked at the numbers and talked to experts, to come up with useful pointers on how to choose a college. Most are tried and true. But there are some new twists for the age of Trump.
Focus On Outcomes
Since Forbes began ranking colleges in 2008, our list has been based entirely on academic, financial and career outcomes (including alumni salaries and extraordinary achievements in business, science, government and the arts). Our methodology, updated in 2021, uses 14 metrics, drawn from government, private sources and Forbes’ own lists, to rank the 500 best four-year, bachelor’s-degree-granting colleges in the United States. We give extra credit to schools that help lower-income students achieve the American dream.
Why don’t we consider reputation, entering test scores, or how big an endowment a college has? Realistically, those factors are baked into outcomes, affecting who gets hired where and, for example, how much debt students graduate with. Both alumni networks and a school’s reputation make a difference when it comes to cracking the internship and job market. Employers can rightly assume that graduates of #1 ranked Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the first schools to get rid of its “test-optional” policy after the pandemic, have smarts (at least as measured by standardized tests) and have survived rigorous classes. (MIT snagged the top spot in part because of the large number of its graduates who go on to earn PhDs and/or high salaries.)
“For the type of family that we work with, especially since they’re high net worth to ultra high net worth, they take into account not just the current political climate, but the longer term, for lack of a better word, return on investment of their child’s education,’’ says Adam Nguyen, founder of Ivy Link and a Harvard Law and Columbia University (undergrad) alum. “So it’s less about the four years being there, which are important years, but it’s the lifetime value of that education, of the brand name of the institution.’’
Focusing on return on investment (ROI) is even more important for students who don’t have rich parents paying and paving their way. In fact, a good reason to focus on outcomes is that it surfaces less well known gems–schools which churn out hard working, smart grads who are prized by employers, particularly in their geographic regions. That’s why we now also produce the New Ivies list, which features schools such as the Georgia Institute of Technology-Main Campus. It has risen to #32 on our overall list, and #7 on our Top Public Colleges list by emphasizing job placement, not exclusivity. Word does get around. For the fall of 2025 freshman class, Georgia Tech accepted 30% of in-state applicants, and just 9% of those from out-of-state. (For comparison, MIT’s admission rate is 4.5%.)
The focus on outcomes, no matter how much money you have, is why we separately rate schools on ROI–this is a metric that looks exclusively at how long it takes grads to recoup their net cost through extra salary, how many students take on debt, and how much in student loans they’re burdened with. That produces some intriguing results. Four of the top five are colleges within the City University of New York system–which started out free and still offers rock bottom in-state tuition, with a commuter culture further reducing costs.
Don’t Be Put Off By A High Sticker Price
The other school in the top five on our ROI list? Princeton University, ranked #3 on our overall list. Its tuition this year is $65,210 with an estimated cost of attendance (that includes housing, food, books and personal expenses) of $90,718. But the Ivy League school’s generous financial aid drastically cuts its average net cost and the number of students leaving with debt. For the class of 2029–that is, this year’s freshmen, it is covering the full cost of attendance (COA) for most families earning up to $150,000, and providing free tuition to most families earning up to $250,000. Moreover, 25% of this year’s incoming class are from low-income families who qualify for federal Pell grants. (Princeton can afford it; its endowment is the biggest, per student, in the nation.)
Ok, we get it. Princeton accepts less than 5% of applicants, and its aid is entirely need-based. But it turns out that at many less-selective private colleges the sticker price is just a starting point and “merit” aid goes to students regardless of need. In the 2024-25 academic year, four-year private colleges listed average tuition and fees of $43,350, but their average net tuition cost (after federal, state and institutional grants were factored in) was $16,510, a 62% discount, according to the College Board. The average COA was $62,990, but the net COA was $36,150, a 43% discount.
That’s still too much money for most families, so we’ve profiled here 25 private schools offering even more generous aid, with one (Pennsylvania’s Washington & Jefferson, #402 on our overall list) knocking an average of more than 80% off its $44,295 annual cost of attendance. To make the generous aid list, schools must offer discounts to at least 95% of students.
Watch The Changing Landscape
By definition, our outcomes-based rankings are backward looking. But families must pay extra attention this year to a college’s current and future prospects. This goes well beyond the slow, population-based drop in enrollment experts have been warning about for years–the sort of long-term challenge that makes Forbes’ financial grades for private colleges valuable.
Suddenly, new risks are swamping the expected demographic decline. There’s the Trump Administration’s devastating cuts to federal research funding that have hit universities in every state; its broad assault on international students; and its frontal attack on individual schools it considers “woke,” including Harvard (#6), the University of Pennsylvania (#10), Cornell (#14), the University of California, Los Angeles (#15) and Northwestern (#16). Add to that the impact of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) passed by the Republican-controlled Congress in July. It cuts off what had been an open loan spigot for future graduate students and raises the tax on the endowment earnings of the richest large private universities, including Princeton, Yale (#9), MIT, Stanford (#4) and Harvard, compounding the challenge for these private PhD granting research universities.
For the most part, this is about strained resources, not sullied reputations. College counselors say the one school that has taken the biggest reputational hit is Columbia University, which ironically, moved up in our outcomes based rankings this year to #2. Some Jewish and conservative parents are still angry that anti-Israel protesters were allowed to disrupt its New York City campus so thoroughly during the 2023-24 school year, while progressives are appalled at the deal Columbia cut in July with the Trump Administration. To get access to more than $1 billion in frozen federal grants and other funds, Columbia agreed to pay $221 million to the government and to other concessions, including handing the feds more information on international students, ending its diversity programs and accepting an independent monitor. In contrast to other Ivy League schools, Columbia’s applications for the class of 2029 entering now fell slightly and its admissions rate rose slightly–to all of 4.3%.
It’s important to note that OBBBA also slashed Medicaid in a way that’s likely to pinch state budgets in coming years, meaning, if history is any guide, less state money for public universities. Separately, a round of state university cutbacks and consolidation is already underway. For example, Utah’s eight public colleges, under pressure from a state mandate that they cut majors with low enrollment and focus on those that are useful to employers, have discontinued 271 degree and certificate programs.
Bottom line: If you’re choosing a school with a specific program in mind, research if it might be endangered.
Think Small
The Trump research disruption and OBBBA loan cuts hit graduate education directly. But undergraduates at PhD granting research universities will feel the aftershocks. There are likely to be fewer research opportunities for undergrads; fewer PhD students available to teach small sections or labs (that make big lectures work); and some specialized majors that get eliminated.
This isn’t just hitting the science departments that pre-Trump relied on grant dollars (and generous overhead payments) from the National Institutes of Health or the National Science Foundation, explains Michael Nietzel, president emeritus of Missouri State University, and a Forbes senior contributor. Large universities that have in the past used their own institutional resources to subsidize liberal arts programs now have to use that money to cover funding gaps in the sciences too. At the University of Chicago (#13), almost all of the arts and humanities departments and some social science departments are pausing new PhD program admissions for 2026-2027, as the school studies consolidations and cost-savings.
A selling point for small colleges has always been the ability of undergraduates to be taught by, and work on research directly with, real professors. That’s even more attractive now that the big research universities, with their graduate student infrastructure, are going through hard times. Nietzel suggests Grinnell College (#116) in Iowa, for those looking to do undergraduate research. Stuckey recommends the University of Richmond (#92), Occidental College (#110) and the College of Wooster (#350). The latter two, he notes approvingly, require undergraduate students to complete a senior thesis before graduation, which means additional time with a professor.
Small colleges look like winners in another way too. In the process of raising the tax on investment earnings of some university endowments, Republicans gave a tax break to more than two dozen of the richest small colleges. (Beginning in 2026, the endowment tax will exempt schools with fewer than 3,000 full-time equivalent tuition-paying students, up from 500 students now.) The endowment winners include such prominent members of Forbes’ Top 50 Small Colleges list as Williams (ranked #7 of all 500), the California Institute of Technology, Amherst, Swarthmore, Claremont McKenna, Wellesley, Pomona, Washington and Lee, Bowdoin, Trinity, Carleton and Grinnell.
“The case for the liberal arts colleges, to me, is stronger than ever,” says college counselor Chris Teare, an Amherst grad who works out of Connecticut and has long been a fan of small schools.
Focus On What Matters To You
Not every school excels at every discipline. An aspiring jazz saxophonist might consider Lawrence University (#312) in Appleton, Wisconsin. American University (#136), in Washington, D.C., could be an ideal home for future public policy wonks. It’s part of the nebulous but all-important “fit”—a student should want to go to their chosen college, feel at home there, and appreciate the campus culture.
Does a big-name school matter to you? “I don’t think that a family who gets into Harvard today is less excited than they would’ve been a couple of years ago,” says Joel Butterly, CEO of admissions consulting company InGenius Prep, based in New Haven, Connecticut. “Prestige has a great deal of inertia,” adds this product of Yale Law and Dartmouth undergrad.
Are you looking for diversity? Five years ago, during the height of nationwide Black Lives Matter protests following the murder of George Floyd, colleges doubled down on their commitments to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) on campus. Now, with the Trump Administration’s insistence that DEI is itself illegal discrimination, colleges are ending most of those efforts and not advertising any that survive. “Colleges no longer primarily promote DEI programs, but you could still evaluate their commitment through a number of things,’’ says Ivy Link’s Nguyen. “For example, you look at the curriculum…look for active courses in ethnic studies, gender studies, LGBTQ+ issues, and even veterans affairs, disability justice, and environmental justice, all of which have racial and ethnic components.” This too is about students wanting to feel welcome–in the wake of the Supreme Court’s June 2023 decision outlawing affirmative action in admissions, applications to historically Black colleges like Howard University (#383) surged. (Click on the name of any college on our list, and you’ll see a full write-up, including its racial make-up, as reported by the schools to the government. Keep in mind, those numbers are a few years old.)
After all this, maybe what you’re really looking for is a less stressful college application experience? In that case, we’ve got yet another list. As we noted when we released last year’s Top Colleges, dozens of schools in Forbes’ top 100 actually admit 30% or more of applicants. And if a one-in-three chance isn’t good enough, over the last decade there’s been a growing movement to reach out to students whose grades meet certain standards with automatic admission offers. More than a dozen states have such programs and just this summer, both Illinois and Tennessee got on the bandwagon.
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Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawhitford/2025/08/26/how-to-choose-a-college-in-trumps-america/
