Here's your Forbes Daily Briefing for Sunday, March 16th. Today on Forbes, Forbes College Financial

Grades 2025, America's strongest and weakest schools. With an executive order looming to

dismantle the Department of Education, it's pretty clear that higher education is high on President Trump's hit list.

Already the administration's January 27th federal funding freeze, which was put on hold by a court injunction in late February,

as well as a congressional push to tax wealthy college endowments, has institutions scrambling to map out their financial futures. Even without Trump,

the nation's bloated offering of nearly 6,000 colleges and universities was facing a dire demand and

supply problem. According to demographers, the number of graduating high school students in the United

States is about to drop precipitously and continue to decline for

up to 15 years. Marjorie Haas, the president of the Council of Independent Colleges and former

president of Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee, says that college leaders have had more than a

decade to prepare for the so-called enrollment cliff, but Trump's full-on

assault could be the Black Swan that finally sends struggling tuition-dependent schools to the graveyard.

She warns, quote, the current and unexpected threats to colleges, such as radical cuts to federal

funding of research and student aid, are more immediately likely to spur campus disasters

than the more gradual and foreseeable demographic shifts.

Which colleges will survive the political and demographic gauntlet?

Each year, since 2013, Forbes has examined the balance sheet health and operating soundness

of the nation's private colleges

with our college financial grades ranking. To create the school grades, we use the latest

available financial data from the National Center for Education Statistics, which covers

the fiscal year ending in June 2023. In total, we graded 868 private, not-for-profit colleges that enroll at least 500 students.

94 schools earned at least an A, up from 54 last year. Of those, 51 earned an A-plus,

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