Forbes assigns both numerical & letter grades for the financial stability of colleges & universities:
The highest rated group consists of 15 schools with a numerical rating of “4.5” and a letter grade of “A+”:
Stanford
MIT
Notre Dame
Princeton
UPenn
Yale
Northwestern
Dartmouth College
Columbia
Williams College
Cornell
CalTech
Rice
Hillsdale College
Carnegie Mellon University (CMU)
Forbes assigns an “A+” rating to an additional 19 schools although each has a numerical grade below “4.5” given to the top 15 schools listed above.
Wash & Lee–4.48
Wellesley College–4.48
Brown–4.46
Duke–4.45
WashUStL–4.45
Carleton College–4.40
Emory–4.34
Davidson College–4.32
Barnard–4.31
Bates–4.31
Harvard–4.31
Berea College–4.28
Grinnell College–4.28
Bowdoin College–4.22
Juilliard School–4.22
Johns Hopkins University–4.21
Claremont McKenna College–4.2
University of Richmond–4.19
Wake Forest University–4.19
Among the colleges & universities which received the second highest letter grade rating of “A” are:
Wesleyan University–4.16
University of Chicago–4.12
Colby College–4.09
Mount Holyoke–4.03
BYU–4.01
Swarthmore College–4.01
Tufts–4.01
Hamilton College–3.98
Haverford College–3.97
Vanderbilt–3.94
Pomona College–3.92
Harvey Mudd–3.88
Amherst College–3.87
Berry College–3.86
Scripps College–3.84
Among the schools which received Forbes third highest letter grade of “A-” are:
Colorado College–3.79
USC–3.78
Lafayette–3.74
Lehigh–3.72
Bucknell–3.65
College of the Holy Cross–3.64
Boston College–3.62
Kenyon College–3.61
Case Western Reserve–3.59
RISD–3.58
Furman University–3.55
Colgate University–3.52
Skidmore College–3.52
Thanks for posting, @Publisher. The table on that site is very glitchy. I found the following solution from an old thread:
Click inside the confines of the table and hit Control-A (select all on Windows, not sure on Mac), then Control-C (copy on Windows, not sure on Mac). Then I pasted it (Control-V or whatever on Mac) into a text editor (Notepad, in my case) or Excel.
I can confirm this works with a Mac, using the Command key instead of Control. I copied it into a Word doc and the formatting was fine.
Thank you @taverngirl.
The Forbes website scroll down list is quite jumpy & difficult to read.
Forbes fourth highest letter grade of “B+” was assigned to the following schools (this list does not include all “B+” rated schools as I just focused on those schools mentioned most on College Confidential):
Suwanee-The Univ. of the South
Pitzer College
Bryn Mawr
Union College
DePauw
Agnes Scott
Middlebury College
Oberlin College
Smith College
Southern Methodist University (SMU)
Texas Christian University (TCU)
St. Olaf
St. Lawrence University
Trinity College
Whitman College
NYU
Villanova
Reed College
Occidental
Liberty University
Boston University–3.17
Some “B” rated schools:
University of Tulsa–3.15
Franklin & Marshall3.12
Brandeis University
American University
Berklee College of Music
Earlham College
There are many more “B” rated schools.
The sixth highest letter rating / grade = “B-”.
Interesting that GWU (George Washington University) received a letter grade of “B-”.
Because the Forbes website scroll down list is jumpy & difficult to read, I will stop here & encourage readers to access the Forbes website scroll down list cited in the post which opened this thread.
Future ratings by Forbes are likely to be different due to the current recession started by the novel coronavirus (Covid-19) outbreak.
What this tells me is that there are a lot high-flying USnews perennial favorites that are probably spending above their means.
@circuitrider: Which schools ?
^Right off the top of my head I can go down the list of the top ten Nat’l LACs on the USNews rankings:
Amherst
Swarthmore
Pomona
Middlebury
Haverford
which have presumably been maintaining their positions all these years largely on the basis of their small student bodies and huge financial surpluses. Now, it turns out that these fine institutions are no more financially stable than #21 Wesleyan which has arguably the second largest student body in NESCAC.
And, who knew the University of Chicago would fall so far from the tippy-tippy top?