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BYU: Most Recommended, Strongest Financially, and Best Library

January 2025

Two female students walking on BYU campus in summertime.

Reaching number 20 overall in the 2024 Best Colleges in America rankings by the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) and College Pulse, Brigham Young University joins the likes of Princeton, MIT, Yale, Stanford, and Harvard in the top 25.

The new rankings put a greater focus on the value added by colleges, emphasize how much a college improves its students’ chances of graduating on time, and look at how much the college boosts the salaries students earn after graduation.

BYU received a 93/100 on the student recommendation score—the highest of all 400 schools ranked. The score measures the extent to which students would recommend their college to a friend, whether they would choose the same college again if they could start over, and their satisfaction with the value for money their college provides. For reference, Princeton (number 1, overall) earned a recommendation score of 84.

In the subcategory of “salary impact,” BYU ranked 13; in the subcategory of “social mobility,” BYU got the number 26 spot. This year’s rankings are based on one of the largest surveys of US students ever conducted.

“Some college-ranking methodologies tend to have the effect of splitting universities into the haves and the have-nots by evaluating the resources a college has at its disposal,” reads a WSJ story on the rankings published September 6. “The new WSJ/College Pulse ranking uses the most recent available data to put colleges on a more level playing field, with a focus on comparing the outcomes of each school’s graduates to what those students were likely to achieve no matter where they went to school.”

The rankings weigh student outcomes (such as salary impact, years to pay off net price, graduation rate) at 70 percent, learning environment (learning opportunities, preparation for career, recommendation score) at 20 percent and diversity (opportunities to interact with students from different backgrounds, ethnic diversity, international diversity) at 10 percent. The Wall Street Journal has published college rankings since 2016.

The WSJ ranking nicely complements two other recent number one rankings: The Princeton Review ranked BYU’s Harold B. Lee Library as the country’s best college library, and Forbes said BYU is America’s financially strongest school—awarding it an A+ grade.

“Selecting a financially sound school is more important than ever,” the Forbes article reported, referencing the long-forecasted demographic drop in high school grads in the years to come. BYU tied with the University of Pennsylvania for the top spot and beat out Cornell, Yale, Stanford, and Duke among the top 15.


Other recent BYU rankings:

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