These are the 51 schools assigned a grade of A+ in 2025:
Carleton
JHU
Hillsdale
UPenn
Dartmouth
Amherst
Pomona
Brown
Swarthmore
Stanford
Colorado College
Berea
Claremont McKenna
Cornell
Haverford
Carnegie Mellon
Columbia
Vassar
Harvard
Caltech
Grinnell
Notre Dame
Mount Holyoke
Yale
Williams
Harvey Mudd
Wellesley
Lafayette
Smith
New England Conservatory of Music
Hampden–Sydney
McPherson
Hamilton
Reed
Whitman
Cooper Union
Washington and Lee
Wake Forest
St. John’s (MD)
Holy Cross
DePauw
Grove City
Wheaton (IL)
Duke
WashU
Northwestern
Kenyon
MIT
Davis & Elkins
Rice
Lehigh
In a past thread, there was some discussion about whether taking on more debt, as would happen with a major construction project, would affect a college’s rating Even a rich one.
This came up last year and I think it has to do with how they do their calculations. Princeton is, and has been, going through a ridiculously large number of simultaneous construction projects. I’m sure the financing of those creates numbers the Forbes model doesn’t like.
They should probably get an A+ on the fact they can afford to build and entire new small college (dorms, grad housing, sports fields, museum, new school of Engineering, and the list goes on) in one go. That’s how much money they have!
It sort of makes me wonder if the A+ schools are really just hoarding their capital versus actually trying to deploy it. I kind of like that Princeton with all this money is spending it.
This is precisely the debate Wesleyan alumni have been having since the 1970s. In other words, does the fact that it is twice as big programmatically and physically today as it was in 1970 mean it is twice as good?
Even a rich one.