Forbes magazine just released their updated list of “New Ivies” for 2025. Six new schools join the list this year: Purdue, University of Pittsburgh, West Point , Tufts. Wash U and William and Mary. I find the “new Ivy” and “public ivy” monikers kind of silly - but I guess its click bait.
https://archive.is/2025.03.26-201924/https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawhitford/2025/03/26/the-new-ivies-2025-20-great-colleges-employers-love/
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Thanks for sharing. I found the article interesting, not so much for what it said about the New Ivies, but about the survey results it reported out on from employers. These were some of the quotes that I found most intriguing:
In a Forbes survey answered by more than 380 C-suite inhabitants, vice presidents and other managers, 37% said they are less likely to hire an Ivy League graduate than they were five years ago—up from 33% who said the same last year. Another 12% said they would never hire an Ivy League graduate. Survey respondents pointed to graduates’ attitudes and lack of humility as sticking points.
Not so great news for Ivy grads. Definitely lets people (whether they have an Ivy on their resume or not) that boastfulness is not an attractive quality.
About a third of Forbes survey respondents say they are more likely to hire graduates from non-Ivy private colleges than they were five years ago, and 38% say the same of public college graduates. Only 6% say they are more likely to hire from the Ivy League. “The gap between graduates from Ivies and other public/private universities is shrinking,” says one vice president at a company with more than 5,000 employees. “Public university students seem to exhibit more empathy than others, and passion to innovate and take up steep learning curves to master skills required in current situations is more important.”
I found the part about taking up steep learning curves very interesting. Since the Ivies (and other Top X schools that got mentioned in the article) have such low acceptance rates, it often feels as though one has to be “perfect” to get in. And I think the fear of failure (or the fear of a “B”) is very real for a number of students who are gunning for admission to these colleges, which sounds like it may be spilling over into their professional lives. Better to succeed at something that comes more naturally than to struggle at something where one is not assured of success?
Employers were most impressed with the changes at public universities. Forty-two percent said public colleges were doing a better job at preparing entry-level job candidates than they were five years ago. About 30% said it was the same, and 16% said public colleges were doing a worse job. For the non-Ivy privates, 37% of respondents said the schools were doing a better job at preparing entry-level job candidates, 33% said it was about the same, and 17% said it was getting worse.
Good news for publics! I wonder what it is that the publics and non-Ivy privates are doing that is making the survey respondents feel that students are better prepared for entry-level positions. I suspect that it may involve career services and co-ops, but that is definitely conjecture on my part.
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Sorry, where is the actual list of schools? Maybe it’s just me but I can’t seem to find it.
Repeating from last year are:
- Johns Hopkins
- Northwestern
- U. of Michigan
Newcomers:
- WashU
- Tufts
- Purdue
- Pitt
- West Point
- William & Mary
Unclear if it’s new:
- UVA
Since Forbes includes test scores as a metric, the UCs were excluded from consideration.
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For some reason the list loads in after the page loads, and so maybe the Internet Archive link didn’t capture the list? The original page (here) works for me to see the list; might work for you.
Thank you all.
The original site requires a subscription.
Ah, sorry; for some reason (ad blocker?) the subscription roadblock doesn’t show up for me. Glad @AustenNut and @Greatpyrmom were able to post the info.
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Excited for Pitt. Hearing about Pitt more and more and we visited and were super impressed.
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Both my kids liked Pitt but being OOS merit was not enough to make it affordable compared to instate
Why no Stanford, MIT, U Chicago, Duke, Vandy, ND?
For some of those schools, this is the answer:
We removed the traditional Ivy schools—Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Penn, Princeton and Yale—as well as the four “Ivy plus” colleges, Stanford, MIT, Duke and the University of Chicago.
I’m actually not clear whether they then listed all the colleges that satisfied their remaining three criteria, or just ones that did best on the survey they send out, although I suspect the latter.
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So they apparently think of it as “Ivies,” “Ivy Plus” and “New Ivies.” Okay, sure, why not…
Regardless of the technical reason (lack of test score data), it’s hard to take a “public ivies” list seriously without the UCs, two of which typically take the two 2 spots in most rankings and lists for public schools, and many of the others typically are high on the lists too.
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And if you were asking me–strangely Forbes did not check with me first–there is a deep irony in all these articles which are on the one hand basically trying to bash Ivies, and then on the other praising other colleges in terms of how much they are like Ivies.
Rhetoric aside, though, I do think there is a fundamental truth to the idea that a lot of colleges are in some ways gaining reputational ground with competitive employers. I am less convinced that is notably coming at the expense of Ivies or Ivy+ or whatever.
Because big picture, what has happened is the total employer demand for highly-qualified college graduates has expanded far faster than the supply available at just those particular colleges, who have not expanded enrollment much if at all for decades now. So really, employers have no choice–they have to cast a wider net over time.
And that’s great, but it doesn’t necessarily support an anti-Ivy narrative. And who knows, but I have seen entities like Forbes and the WSJ and such declaring the imminent death of the Ivies going at least back to the early 1990s (and probably before, I just wouldn’t have been aware much earlier). What seems to keep happening instead is more and more highly-qualified kids want to go to Ivies, and so they keep becoming harder admits.
Which is really the opposite side of the same coin. Again, these colleges have done little to expand, and this is really a two-sided market, where prospective students and prospective employers want to meet each other. And if there is not enough capacity for all the highly qualified students on the one side, and employers looking for highly qualified students on the other side, to meet each other at just these capacity-constrained colleges? Well, they will start meeting each other at other colleges too. And I think they are.
But the idea they have meaningfully STOPPED meeting each other at the Ivies and Ivy+? Not seeing that really supported by the data, but I guess we shall see. However, if the point is they are increasingly sharing that role with more and more other colleges? That I believe is true, indeed inevitable.
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Agree with you: where is UCLA and UC Berkeley? I suspect Forbes is a shadow of its former self.
It says in the article that they only considered schools that accept test scores. California schools do not, so those schools were excluded from the ranking.
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Why is that even a consideration? How does accepting and not accepting test scores indicate a level of “Ivy-ness”? The whole article is kind of pointless when in its own Top Colleges list, some of these “New Ivies” are ranked in the 40’s and 50’s. Forbes America's Top Colleges List 2025 - Best US Universities Ranked
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Good topic for discussion, thanks! Aside from what’s been already been discussed in this thread about lack of humility (entitlement) perhaps making Ivy grads chafe under the yoke of an entry-level position (or making employers perceive them that way), I wonder whether peer exposure is a factor. Publics still bring a more socioeconomically diverse group of students together (middle class donut hole families are more represented than at publics than at Ivies, for example). Regardless, it’s always sad that these things are looked at as a zero-sum game (some schools are “getting better” and so the Ivies must therefore be “getting worse”). Just the exercise of asking employers these kinds of questions might be a non-neutral intervention that stokes class resentment and fuels negative stereotypes.
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Ranking (of anything) is pretty much a zero sum game. So is admission to a specific college or program that has a fixed capacity that is smaller than the number of applicants.
Sure, getting a spot at a college, or getting a job, might be part of what is intrinsically a zero-sum game, but treating people as if they have value is not a zero sum game…I was referring to quotes from the article like this one:
Also, can’t there be improvements at some colleges without necessitating that the quality of education had decreased elsewhere?