Locator: 49287COLLEGE.
College rankings. College rankings matter. At one time I did not think so, but I do now. And to some extent it's because there's been a shuffling of the top ten over the past decade. It took a "Trump" presidency to make me pay attention.
The WSJ didn't start publishing college rankings until 2015 / 2016, so let's look at WSJ college rankings. in 2018 (2017), first:
- Harvard: 1 (2)
- Columbia: 2 (5)
- MIT: 3 (3)
- Stanford: 3 (1)
- Cornell
- Duke
- Yale
- CIT
- University of Pennsylvania
- Princeton University
Most recent, 2026, The WSJ:
- Stanford University
- Babson College -- Massachusetts
- Yale University -- New Haven, CT
- Princeton University -- NJ
- Harvard University
- Claremont McKenna College -- California
- University of California, Berkeley
- Columbia University
- University of Pennsylvania
- Davidson College -- North Carolina
- MIT
- Bentley University -- Boston metro area
- University of California, Davis
- University of California, Merced
- Harvey Mudd College -- Claremont, CA
- Georgia Institue of Technology, Main Campus
- San Jose State University
- Cornell University -- upstate New York
- Loyola University of Maryland
- University of Notre Dame
Comments:
- San Jose State and Stanford, through ROTC, have a very close relationship;
- Harvard dropping from first to fifth is noteworthy;
- the number of relatively unknown colleges in the most recent list is very noteworthy.
- more and more a contest between two states: Massachusetts and northern California
- neither USC nor UCL make the top 20 list
- in vast fly-over country, only one makes the list: Notre Dame
New York: I've always wondered why there is a such a paucity of high-ranked schools in New York (state, city) -- the city's likely new mayor explains all that.
Geographically, your preference: New England (New Jersey, Boston, upstate New York, NYC) or the Pacific west coast.
Stanford: founded by a railroad magnate. Is it time for Trump-Jensen Huang-Gates to start a new STEM university with a first-rate business school to be located in Napa Valley?
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Claude
Has a great commercial.
Claude: not a worse time ever for a problem. Research it, find it, solve it.
CNBC all day long, except for Cramer, Mike Santoli, and "the judge": not a worse time ever for a problem. Invest accordingly.