This MA College Is The 2nd Best In The Country, Wall Street Journal Says

MASSACHUSETTS — Twenty-five institutions in Massachusetts are among the 500 best public and private colleges and universities in the country, according to the 2025 rankings from The Wall Street Journal.

Massachusetts’s top school is Babson College, the private institution in Wellesley, according to The WSJ/College Pulse 2025 Best Colleges in the U.S. ranking. Seven other Massachusetts colleges made the top 100.

The Wall Street Journal noted that in the ranking, half of the colleges in the top 50 are new to the list. But the top-ranked school remained unchanged from the previous ranking.

New Jersey’s Princeton University, a four-year Ivy League private school known for its rigorous academic standards and selectivity in admissions, topped the ranking for the second year in a row.

“Our ranking measures how well each college sets graduates up for financial success. We look at how much a school improves students’ chances of graduating and their future earnings, balancing these outcomes with feedback from students on college life,” The Journal wrote. “We don’t measure reputation, nor the college’s own finances.”

Schools in the top 50 from Massachusetts are:

6. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

7. Harvard University

11. Bentley University

Other colleges from Massachusetts included in the full ranking are:

65. College of the Holy Cross

86. Wellesley College

90. Worcester Polytechnic Institute

100. Boston College

120. Amherst College

168. Northeastern University, Boston

171. Boston University

172. Wentworth Institute of Technology

173. Stonehill College

174. Williams College

205. Simmons University

246. Suffolk University

281. Tufts University

313. University of Massachusetts, Lowell

331. University of Massachusetts, Boston

335. Brandeis University

361. Bridgewater State University

412. Smith College

456. Clark University

457. Mount Holyoke College

The Journal said public schools are prominent among colleges that moved up in the rankings. Two are in the top 10 — the University of California, Berkeley at No. 8, and the Georgia Institute of Technology at No. 9. Last year, there were no public schools in the top 10.

The Journal developed the ranking in collaboration with research partners College Pulse and Statista.

Read more on the methodology and findings on The Wall Street Journal.