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

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28 institutions

Published at

https://www.wsj.com/rankings/college-rankings/best-colleges-2026

An index earns its place here when an institution quotes it. Whether the wider world has heard of the publisher is beside the point: a table somebody has advertised a placement in is a table that counts.

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.

Rank	Institution	Claim
1	Stanford University	1st in the world
3	Yale University	3rd in the world
4	Princeton University	4th in the world
5	Harvard University	5th in the world
7	University of California, Berkeley	7th in the world
8	Columbia University	8th in the world
9	University of Pennsylvania	9th in the world
11	Massachusetts Institute of Technology	11th in the world
16	Georgia Institute of Technology	16th in the world
18	Cornell University	18th in the world
23	California Institute of Technology	23rd in the world
25	University of Michigan-Ann Arbor	25th in the world
26	Rice University	26th in the world
27	Brown University	27th in the world
30	University of Chicago	30th in the world
34	Vanderbilt University	34th in the world
37	University of Southern California	37th in the world
41	University of California, San Diego	41st in the world
46	Carnegie Mellon University	46th in the world
49	University of Texas at Austin	49th in the world
50	Northwestern University	50th in the world
55	University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign	55th in the world
68	Duke University	68th in the world
77	University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill	77th in the world
80	University of California, Los Angeles	80th in the world
92	Johns Hopkins University	92nd in the world
94	University of Wisconsin-Madison	94th in the world
97	University of Washington	97th in the world