Cornell College

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• Top 6 Colleges in Iowa

  Currently #4 · score 0

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• University of Iowa

  The University of Iowa, founded in 1847, is home to the Iowa Writers' Workshop, widely regarded as the most prestigious creative writing MFA program in the country, having produced more Pulitzer Prize winners than any other creative writing program in American higher education. The university's hospital system and medical school rank among the top public academic medical centers in the country, and Iowa was the first public university in the United States to grant a law degree to a woman, in 1873, reflecting a historically early institutional commitment to gender-inclusive professional education. Iowa's college of business and its actuarial science program have built strong regional reputations, and the university's continued investment in creative writing beyond the Writers' Workshop, including its International Writing Program hosting authors from around the world, has made Iowa City a UNESCO City of Literature, one of very few American cities to hold that designation. The university's combination of a genuinely world-leading creative writing program and a strong academic medical center has given Iowa an unusually specific dual identity among American public research universities, drawing students to Iowa City for reasons rarely shared by peer institutions of similar size.

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• Iowa State University

  Iowa State University, founded in 1858 as the country's first designated land-grant institution under the Morrill Act, has built one of the strongest agricultural and veterinary medicine programs in the country, reflecting its founding role in establishing the entire American land-grant university system. The university's engineering programs benefit from its historical role in early computing research — the Atanasoff-Berry Computer, developed at Iowa State in the late 1930s, is considered by many historians to be the first electronic digital computer, predating better-known later computing developments by several years. Iowa State's design college and its agricultural biotechnology research have built strong national reputations, and the university's continued strength in plant and animal sciences reflects Iowa's position as one of the country's most significant agricultural states economically. The university's combination of founding-era land-grant status, an early and historically significant role in computing history, and its continued agricultural research strength has made Iowa State one of the most institutionally distinctive land-grant universities in the country.

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• Grinnell College

  Grinnell College, founded in 1846, holds one of the largest endowments per student of any liberal arts college in the country, a financial position built substantially on an early, highly successful investment in Intel stock by a trustee in the 1960s that grew into a massive long-term return for the college's endowment. The college's open curriculum, imposing no distribution requirements beyond a single required first-year tutorial, gives Grinnell students more freedom to design their own academic path than almost any other selective liberal arts college, an approach the school has maintained consistently for decades. Grinnell's rural Iowa setting, in a small town far from any major metropolitan area, has fostered a tight-knit, socially and politically engaged campus culture, and the college's substantial endowment funds need-blind admission and full-need financial aid for both domestic and international applicants. The college's combination of massive per-student financial resources, genuine curricular freedom, and its rural Midwestern setting has made Grinnell one of the most distinctive and well-resourced small liberal arts colleges in the country, consistently ranked among the top liberal arts institutions nationally.

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• Drake University

  Drake University, founded in 1881, has built a strong national reputation for its journalism and mass communication program, and the university's Drake Relays, one of the oldest and most prestigious collegiate track and field events in the country, has been held continuously on campus since 1910. The university's law school and its Cowles Library have built solid regional reputations, and Drake's location in Des Moines, Iowa's capital and largest city, gives students access to the state's concentration of insurance industry headquarters and government institutions. Drake's role hosting nationally televised presidential debates and campaign events during Iowa's first-in-the-nation caucus season has given the university's political science and journalism programs unusually direct access to national political coverage and campaign infrastructure every four years. The university's combination of a respected journalism program, its historic Drake Relays track and field tradition, and its recurring role in national presidential campaign coverage has made Drake one of the more distinctive mid-sized private universities in the Midwest.

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• Luther College

  Luther College, founded in 1861 by Norwegian Lutheran immigrants, has built one of the strongest undergraduate music programs among liberal arts colleges in the Midwest, and its Nordic Choir has toured internationally, maintaining the college's continued connection to its Norwegian Lutheran founding heritage. The college's small size, around 1,800 undergraduates, and its scenic bluff-top campus overlooking the Upper Iowa River in Decorah give Luther a distinctive natural setting that's become closely tied to the college's outdoor recreation and environmental studies programs. Luther's study-abroad participation rate is among the highest of any liberal arts college in the country, reflecting the college's continued institutional emphasis on global engagement, and its biology and pre-health advising programs have built solid reputations for placing graduates into competitive graduate and medical programs. The college's combination of a nationally respected music program, its Norwegian Lutheran heritage, and its scenic river-bluff campus setting has made Luther a distinctive choice among the Midwest's smaller liberal arts colleges, particularly for students interested in vocal or instrumental music alongside a broader liberal arts education.

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• edX

  edX was founded in 2012 as a joint nonprofit venture between Harvard University and MIT, launched specifically to offer free access to real university-level courses from elite institutions, directly following the same MOOC wave that produced Coursera the same year. The platform's nonprofit, open-source origins distinguished it from venture-backed for-profit competitors, and edX's underlying Open edX software platform was made freely available for other institutions and organizations to build their own independent online course offerings. edX was acquired in 2021 by the for-profit online education company 2U for $800 million, a transaction that marked a significant shift for a platform that had spent its first decade explicitly organized as a nonprofit mission-driven initiative between two of the world's most prestigious universities. edX's combination of its founding as a nonprofit Harvard-MIT partnership and its later acquisition by a for-profit education company has made it one of the most institutionally significant online learning platforms in the MOOC movement's history.

• Udemy

  Udemy was founded in 2010, built around an open marketplace model letting virtually any individual instructor create and sell their own online course on any subject, a significantly more open and decentralized approach than platforms built around institutional university partnerships. The platform's marketplace structure, with instructors setting their own course content and often competing directly with other instructors teaching similar subjects, created an unusually large and varied course catalog spanning technical skills, business topics, and countless niche hobbyist subjects. Udemy's frequent deep-discount pricing promotions, regularly offering courses normally priced much higher for a small fraction of that cost, became a well-known and sometimes criticized part of the platform's sales strategy, reflecting the competitive economics of its open instructor marketplace. Udemy's combination of its open marketplace model for independent instructors and its massive, wide-ranging course catalog has made it one of the largest online learning platforms by total course volume in the industry.

• MasterClass

  MasterClass was founded in 2015 by David Rogier, built around a genuinely novel premise for online education: rather than academic instructors, the platform recruits world-renowned experts and celebrities, including chefs, athletes, and artists, to teach polished, cinematically produced courses in their specific fields of mastery. The platform's production values, using film-quality cinematography and editing rather than typical webcam-style online course recording, positioned MasterClass as much as premium entertainment content as traditional education, blurring the line between the two categories. MasterClass's roster of instructors, including figures like Gordon Ramsay teaching cooking and Serena Williams teaching tennis, relies heavily on the specific celebrity and expertise of each instructor as the platform's core value proposition, a different model than platforms built around institutional academic credibility. MasterClass's combination of its celebrity-instructor business model and its unusually high cinematic production values has made it one of the most distinctive online learning platforms in the industry.

• Duolingo

  Duolingo was founded in 2011 by Carnegie Mellon professor Luis von Ahn and his graduate student Severin Hacker, built around a free, gamified approach to language learning using short daily lessons, points, and streaks to encourage consistent practice habits. Von Ahn, who had previously co-created reCAPTCHA, brought a similar interest in crowdsourced technology to Duolingo's original business model, which for a time relied partly on having users translate real documents and web content as a byproduct of their language practice exercises. Duolingo's owl mascot, Duo, became known for its aggressively persistent notification style, reminding users to complete their daily lessons, a marketing approach that became a genuine internet meme and a widely recognized piece of the app's brand identity. Duolingo's combination of its gamified, streak-based approach to habit formation and its widely memed mascot-driven engagement strategy has made it one of the most downloaded and culturally recognized education apps ever created.

• Coursera

  Coursera was founded in 2012 by Stanford computer science professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, building on the massive open online course (MOOC) format that had generated significant attention after Stanford's own free online AI course drew over 100,000 enrolled students the previous year. The platform's partnership model, hosting courses created by actual professors from major universities including Stanford, Yale, and the University of Michigan, gave it a level of institutional academic credibility that distinguished it from platforms built around independent instructors. Coursera's evolution to offer full online degree programs and professional certificates from major employers including Google and IBM reflected a broader shift in how the platform positioned itself, moving from free enrichment courses toward credentialed programs with direct career and educational value. Coursera's combination of its origins in Stanford's pioneering MOOC experiments and its evolution into a platform offering full accredited degrees has made it one of the most academically significant online learning platforms in the industry.