Wall Street Journal/College Pulse 2026 Best Colleges in the U.S.

Recorded placements 28

Institutions the Index records in this table. A placement here is a placement anywhere: the Index reports each institution's best, whatever its scope.

1. #1Stanford University1st in the world
2. #3Yale University3rd in the world
3. #4Princeton University4th in the world
4. #5Harvard University5th in the world
5. #7University of California, Berkeley7th in the world
6. #8Columbia University8th in the world
7. #9University of Pennsylvania9th in the world
8. #11Massachusetts Institute of Technology11th in the world
9. #16Georgia Institute of Technology16th in the world
10. #18Cornell University18th in the world
11. #23California Institute of Technology23rd in the world
12. #25University of Michigan-Ann Arbor25th in the world
13. #26Rice University26th in the world
14. #27Brown University27th in the world
15. #30University of Chicago30th in the world
16. #34Vanderbilt University34th in the world
17. #37University of Southern California37th in the world
18. #41University of California, San Diego41st in the world
19. #46Carnegie Mellon University46th in the world
20. #49University of Texas at Austin49th in the world
21. #50Northwestern University50th in the world
22. #55University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign55th in the world
23. #68Duke University68th in the world
24. #77University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill77th in the world
25. #80University of California, Los Angeles80th in the world
26. #92Johns Hopkins University92nd in the world
27. #94University of Wisconsin-Madison94th in the world
28. #97University of Washington97th in the world