MONEY
Lehigh University
Here are America’s 10 best colleges
LinkedIn’s latest college ranking focuses on career outcomes, revealing unexpected schools that outperform better-known rivals
Daniel de ViséUSA TODAY
Aug. 9, 2026, 5:06 a.m. ET
Lehigh University is a selective Pennsylvania institution with a national reputation and a $2 billion endowment.
Lehigh does well in college rankings – but usually not as well as the University of Chicago or Columbia.
Yet those schools rank just above and below Lehigh in a new college ranking, titled LinkedIn Top Colleges 2026.
The ranking uses LinkedIn data to identify 50 colleges and universities that “best set their graduates up for career success,” in terms of internships, job placement, professional networking and other factors.
The resulting list recognizes schools such as Lehigh, where 88% of graduates complete internships and 89,000 belong to a vigorous alumni network
“Fundamentally, for a long time we’ve been about student outcomes,” said Nathan Urban, provost of Lehigh. “Do they get good jobs? Do they have good careers 10 years after they’ve left the university?”
College rankings are everywhere these days. U.S. News still offers its venerable list of Best Colleges, a ranking that favors schools with the largest endowments and lowest admission rates. Other rankings focus more on <a href="https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankings/latest/world-ranking” rel=”nofollow noopener” target=”_blank”>international standing, access and affordability or return on investment.
Colleges decry rankings. Applicants love them
College leaders decry rankings as arbitrary: Is it even fair to compare Princeton, the Ivy League campus that ranks first in the latest U.S. News ranking of national universities, to MIT, the science and technology powerhouse that ranks second?
But high school seniors and their families turn to the rankings every fall, hoping to differentiate among the approximately 4,000 degree-granting colleges in America.
“They need information. They need guidance. Rankings are oner rankings that are focused on actual outcomes: What happens to students who go to these universities.”
The LinkedIn rankings, released Aug. 4, mine data from the massive professional networking site to find the colleges that seem to deliver the strongest career preparation and support to their students, based on five metrics:
- Job placement, measured as the percentage of recent alumni who start graduate school or full-time work the year they graduate;
- Internships and recruiter demand, tracking how many alumni completed undergraduate internships, and recruiter interest in those alumni;
- Career success, the share of alumni with “post-graduate entrepreneurship or leadership experience”;
- Network strength, how well alumni connect with each other;
- And knowledge breadth, how many fields of study and unique skills recent alumni pursued.
“We’re actually looking at what happens to the individuals who graduate from those schools across their careers,” said Laura Lorenzetti, vice president and executive editor of LinkedIn Global Editorial.
The LinkedIn ranking debuted in 2025. The 50 colleges on the 2026 list “really create momentum that lasts well beyond graduation, that lasts well beyond that first job,” Lorenzetti said
Here are the 10 best colleges
The top 10 on the LinkedIn rankings won’t surprise anyone familiar with the pervasive U.S. News rankings, or with any other list of prestigious universities. They are:
- Princeton University
- Duke University
- Harvard University
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
- Dartmouth College
- University of Pennsylvania
- Notre Dame of Maryland University
- Cornell University
- Yale University
- Stanford University
In other words, this ranking “looks like all the rest of them,” said Paul Glastris, editor in chief of the Washington Monthly, which offers alternative college rankings.
Beyond the top 10, though, the LinkedIn list gets less predictable. Consider these entries:
- At #13, Babson College, a Massachusetts business school that doesn’t appear in the main U.S. News rankings;
- At #16, Bucknell University, a liberal arts school with a keen focus on outcomes and career success;
- And at #23, Lehigh, tucked between UChicago and Columbia University. In the U.S. News ranking, Lehigh comes in 46th.
Babson, with about 2,800 undergraduate students, blends business and liberal arts and sciences in a core curriculum. The school boasts that 98% of its class of 2025 were working, continuing their education or involved in volunteer or service programs within six months of graduation.
The Massachusetts school ranked second in the nation in the WSJ/College Pulse 2026 Best Colleges list, another ranking that measures future success.
Such rankings are “always helpful,” said Poonam Arora, dean of the Undergraduate School at Babson. “There’s all sorts of lists. I think the ones that target RoI and the value-add of a college are meaningful.”
Rankings have evolved from ‘best college’ to ‘best value’
Modern college rankings have existed since at least the 1980s. For many years, they served primarily to help prospective applicants sort colleges by reputation and selectivity.
Recently, however, parents and policymakers have focused more on how well colleges prepare students for the working world, and on the broader question of whether college is worth the cost
“I’ve been asked that question more times in the last three years than in the previous 30,” said Rob Franek, editor in chief of the Princeton Review, a longtime
In 2024, Pew Research reported that only 22% of adults consider college “worth it” for students who have to take out loans. The federal government’s College Scorecard pointedly tracks cost and value in higher education.
“You see this hunger for more evidence of RoI from universities because, frankly, families are getting more skeptical of the value proposition of higher education to begin with,” said Armand Alacbay, chief of staff and senior vice president of strategy at the American Council of Trustees and Alumni.
Newer college rankings focus less on pedigree and more on outputs, like a good job.
“Our parents, our families and our students are expecting a return on their investments,” said Moe McGuinness, dean of students at Bucknell.
One thing most college rankings do not measure, however, is how much students learn in college.
A classic 2011 book on academia, Academically Adrift, found that many college students don’t gain much actual knowledge. But it’s hard to measure learning in a college ranking.
“You’ve got job placement. You’ve got recruiter demand. These are obviously high on the priority list for a lot of parents,” said Alacbay of ACTA. “But what happens when they get there? What will they learn?”
