Top 500 Ranked Private Colleges and Universities

How do we rank these schools? Learn more about our college ranking system.
Note that some schools do not have enough data to be ranked, and these schools will not appear in our lists. To find information about a school not listed below, try our site search at the bottom of this page.

Top 500 Ranked Private Colleges and Universities

Rank			Private Colleges and Universities
2020	2015	School Name	2020	2015
1	1	California Institute of Technology	100.00	No Change
2 ↑	4	Massachusetts Institute of Technology	99.62	No Change
3	3	Princeton University	99.61	No Change
4 ↑	7	Williams College	99.55	99.20 (↑0.4%)
5	5	University of Notre Dame	99.33	No Change
6 ↑	8	Swarthmore College	99.27	99.04 (↑0.2%)
7 ↑	11	Middlebury College	99.17	98.94 (↑0.2%)
8 ↑	12	Wesleyan University	99.11	98.93 (↑0.2%)
9 ↑	17	Bowdoin College	99.09	98.80 (↑0.3%)
10 ↓	9	Rice University	99.02	No Change
11 ↓	6	Amherst College	99.01	99.27 (↓0.3%)
12 ↑	13	Pomona College	98.98	No Change
13 ↑	21	Carleton College	98.95	98.66 (↑0.3%)
14 ↑	132	Vanderbilt University	98.95	93.32 (↑6.0%)
15 ↑	19	Wellesley College	98.91	98.74 (↑0.2%)
16 ↓	10	Vassar College	98.73	99.02 (↓0.3%)
17 ↑	22	Claremont McKenna College	98.67	No Change
18 ↑	70	Franklin W Olin College of Engineering	98.66	95.68 (↑3.1%)
19 ↓	14	Brown University	98.61	98.87 (↓0.3%)
20	20	Harvey Mudd College	98.59	98.69 (↓0.1%)

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