The 50 Best Colleges In America

What are the best colleges in America?
Business Insider set out to answer this question based on the only factor that matters: how much a college will help you succeed in your future career.

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We think a great college should:

• teach you skills that will help you in whatever profession you choose--namely, writing, speaking, and critical thinking (CURRICULUM)

• give you a credential that will impress future recruiters, employers, colleagues, and graduate schools (BRAND), and

• give you access to a network of influential alumni and classmates who can help you in your career (NETWORK)

We asked our readers to to help us rank colleges according to these criteria. And our readers say Massachusetts Institute of Technology is the best college in the country.
While US News and Forbes evaluate colleges on obscure factors, such as alumni giving rate and freshman retention rate, our list comes from a survey of the people who matter most to your future career -- other professionals, employers and executives.  80 percent of the respondents have hired at least 1-10 people. 39 percent said they were in senior management.
This survey was open to our readers for the past month. They responded with an overwhelming endorsement of the Ivy League and a few select universities -- MIT, Stanford, the California Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago.
Large universities ranked high on our list, thanks presumably to good name recognition.
Notably low on our list are liberal arts colleges, like Williams and Amherst. Although these schools are ranked highly by others publications, they apparently carry less weight in the real world.
So, let's get to it...

Scroll through America's Best Colleges >

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