The top 10 best private colleges in the U.S.

While we’ve touted community colleges and public colleges as a way to make college more affordable, private colleges definitely have their benefits–especially those with large endowments, which tend to be most generous with financial aid.

College Factual recently released their list of the top 10 best private colleges in the U.S., based on factors including student body caliber, educational resources, level of degree completion, and post-graduate earnings.

Unlike other lists that are based more on factors like prestige and admissions rate, the College Factual methodology focuses more on the quality of the education students receive at the college and graduate outcomes.

UPenn tops best private college list

The top 10 includes many familiar names, but not necessarily the usual list and order one might expect.

In fact, Harvard’s not even in the top 3. The University of Pennsylvania ranks number one, followed by Yale University and Duke University.

The University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia topped this year’s list of best private colleges by College Factual. It also won best college overall.

Check out the full list below, and read the reasons behind their selections on USA Today’s website.

1. University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, PA)
2. Yale University (New Haven, NH)
3. Duke University (Durham, NC)
4. Harvard University (Cambridge, MA)
5. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, MA)
6. Brown University (Providence, RI)
7. Stanford University (Stanford, CA)
8. Princeton University (Princeton, NJ)
9. Dartmouth College (Hanover, NH)
10. University of Notre Dame (Notre Dame, IN)

Photo credit: Bryan Y.W. Shin at the English language Wikipedia [GFDL or CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons