Wagner College was ranked among America’s Top Colleges on the annual list published by Forbes magazine earlier this month.
This is Wagner College’s eighth appearance in a row on the highly selective Forbes Top Colleges list, which includes less than 25% of American schools.
According to Forbes, this year’s list of America’s Top Colleges “only rank[s] a slice of America’s colleges and universities, just 600 four-year schools drawn from the nearly 2,700 such degree-granting institutions in the U.S.”
Wagner College was ranked #493 in the nation.
Of special note is the median 10-year salary earned by Wagner College graduates, which places Wagner in the top 35% in New York State for both public and private institutions.
Forbes magazine, best known for its Forbes 500 list of top American businesses, created the America’s Top Colleges list in 2008 for the explicit purpose of competing with the dominant college-ranking publication, U.S. News & World Report’s Best Colleges.
“U.S. News emphasized schools’ reputations,” writes inaugural Top Colleges editor Richard Vedder in a historical reflection published with the new Forbes listing. “I thought colleges should be ranked according to their outcomes. In other words, were students getting enough of a return on their investment in college to make it worth accruing an ever-increasing amount of debt?”
Today’s Forbes college rankings are based on alumni salary, student debt, return on investment, graduation rate, retention rate, two measures of academic success, and the number of graduates appearing on Forbes’s various achievers lists.