In your opinion, what are the top 5 colleges/universities in the U.S.A?

Question

Not specifically for any profession, just all - around best. What do you think?

Answer 1

This is not a very reasonable question. It depends on what you want - big or small, rural or urban, technical or lib arts?
Generally, MIT and Caltech are regarded as the top technical schools in the USA. Based on Faculty, quality of students, resources, facilitites, a list of the most prestigious schools in the USA that few could argue with, would include Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Duke, Stanford, Columbia, Penn, Brown, Dartmouth, and the great public universities such as UCBerkeley, Michigan, UNC, UVa... but for small schools Pomona (not the universally accepted best, but definitely highly respected) Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore, Haverford, Middlebury and all the others listed on the US News list -- they are so indivudual that it is really silly to try to rank them.

Best means "best for you!" There are hundreds of very good schools in the USA. Take a wider look.

Answer 2

Without a more specific context, this is a rather silly question to ask. Its like asking what are the top 5 countries; what metric do you want to use: health care? military power?

For colleges some metrics could be: research funding, undergrad program, grad program, campus atmosphere, average class size, graduation rate, etc. No college is 'best' at all of these.

Answer 3

Depends a lot on what you mean by 'top'. Top in terms of reputation, my list would look a lot like the first person's above.

But in terms of opportunities to learn and to grow, I'd prefer to go to a smaller liberal arts school where profs actually care about their students. You can see the list in the source below, according to US News and World Report. Which I disagree with a bit, because everybody knows Pomona College is the best liberal arts school in the U.S....

Answer 4

University of Michigan- Ann Arbor
University of Miami
University of California- Berkley
University of Texas- Austin
Harvard University

Answer 5

1. Princeton University(NJ) , 2. Harvard University(MA) , 3. Yale University(CT) , 4. California Institute of Technology , 5. Stanford University(CA) .

Answer 6

Harvard
Stanford
Yale
Darmouth
Ivry League

Answer 7

In no particular order:

Harvard
Stanford
Berkeley
Yale
Duke

That's just with my opinion of "best". No one except you can properly define what you consider to be the "best". So, no one but you can properly rank them for you.