Hi everybody, I'm Brittany Lewis, a reporter here at Forbes.

Joining me now is my Forbes colleague Emma Whitford, who covers education.

Emma, thanks so much for joining me.

Thanks so much for having me, Brittany.

This past year has been challenging for higher education in this country to say the least.

Colleges and universities have been subject to funding cuts, student visas have been revoked,

and there have been drastic changes to student loan policies. Forbes recently just dropped its

top colleges list, so A, a big congrats to you, but B, can you give us an overview of this list, especially in the context of the tumultuous time that these universities have faced?

Yeah, it's important to note that our data is mostly federal, so it's always a couple of years behind.

I like to think of the list this year as sort of a snapshot in time for where colleges

stood right before Trump took office.

There weren't any big surprises and changes to the rankings.

There was a pretty even split between the number of public and private universities that

made our top 500.

MIT is number one. They reclaimed the title they had in 2022.

And the University of California schools continued to perform really well.

Berkeley, UCLA, and San Diego all made the top 20 this year.

And as you said, MIT did reclaim that top spot and it knocked out Princeton.

Princeton had it. Princeton is now this year at number four.

What does that movement signify to you? What does that really mean?

Does that tell you anything larger?

Yeah, our list tends to have quite a bit of movement year to year because we are comparing the

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