DePauw University

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• Top 6 Colleges in Indiana

  Currently #4 · score 0

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• University of Notre Dame

  The University of Notre Dame, founded in 1842 by Father Edward Sorin of the Congregation of Holy Cross, is the most prominent Catholic research university in the United States, and its golden-domed Main Building, topped by a statue of the Virgin Mary, is one of the most recognizable university landmarks in the country. Notre Dame's football program has won 11 consensus national championships and produced seven Heisman Trophy winners, and the team's independence from any athletic conference in football specifically, along with its national television contract with NBC dating back to 1991, reflects a level of standalone national athletic relevance matched by very few other university programs. The university's Mendoza College of Business and its law school have each built strong national reputations, and Notre Dame's continued explicit Catholic mission — including mandatory theology and philosophy coursework for all undergraduates regardless of major — distinguishes its academic requirements from those of most secular private research universities. Notre Dame's combination of major-program football success, a devoted national alumni base extending well beyond Indiana, and genuinely strong academics across business, law, and the sciences has made it one of the most recognizable Catholic universities in the world, with a level of national brand awareness that rivals much larger institutions.

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• Indiana University Bloomington

  Indiana University Bloomington, founded in 1820, is the flagship of the Indiana University system, and its Jacobs School of Music is consistently ranked among the very best music conservatories in the country, an unusual strength for a large public research university rather than a dedicated conservatory. The Kelley School of Business is one of the top-ranked undergraduate business programs at any public university in the country, and IU's informatics and computer science programs, built on the university's early leadership in database and information systems research, have grown into some of the strongest in the Midwest. IU's limestone-heavy campus architecture, built using stone quarried from the surrounding southern Indiana region, gives the Bloomington campus a distinctive, uniform aesthetic that's frequently cited among the most attractive public university campuses in the country. The university's combination of a genuinely elite music school, a top-ranked undergraduate business program, and a scenic, self-contained college-town setting in Bloomington has made IU a consistent draw for students seeking a comprehensive public research university experience with unusual specific strength in music alongside its broader academic offerings.

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• Purdue University

  Purdue University, founded in 1869 as a land-grant institution, has built one of the top engineering programs in the country, and the university counts more astronauts among its alumni than any other public university except the US service academies, a distinction closely tied to its long institutional emphasis on aerospace engineering. Neil Armstrong, the first person to walk on the moon, and Gene Cernan, the last person to walk on the moon, are both Purdue engineering graduates, a bookend fact the university actively promotes as reflecting its sustained, decades-long strength in producing aerospace engineers and astronauts. Purdue's decision to freeze undergraduate tuition at its 2012 rate for more than a decade afterward, under then-president and former Indiana governor Mitch Daniels, made it one of the most heavily discussed examples nationally of a major public research university deliberately prioritizing tuition affordability over revenue growth. The university's West Lafayette campus and its continued strength across engineering, agriculture, and veterinary medicine reflect Purdue's land-grant founding mission, and its combination of nationally elite engineering programs and unusually disciplined tuition policy has made it one of the most consistently strong values in American public higher education.

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• Wabash College

  Wabash College, founded in 1832, is one of only a small handful of all-male liberal arts colleges remaining in the United States, having deliberately maintained its single-sex status even as most peer institutions, including most of the historic men's colleges founded around the same era, eventually went coeducational. The college's "Gentleman's Rule," a single, broadly worded code of conduct asking students to act as "a gentleman" in all circumstances rather than a lengthy list of specific prohibited behaviors, has governed student conduct at Wabash for more than a century and reflects the college's distinctive emphasis on self-governance and personal responsibility. Wabash's endowment per student ranks among the highest of any liberal arts college in the country, a financial position built substantially on a historically strong and unusually engaged alumni donor base, funding generous financial aid and academic resources relative to the college's small size. The college's continued commitment to single-sex education, combined with its small size, fewer than 900 students, and its close-knit alumni network, has made Wabash one of the most distinctive small liberal arts colleges remaining in the country, drawing students specifically seeking that particular, increasingly rare educational model.

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• Butler University

  Butler University, founded in 1855, built significant national name recognition through its men's basketball program's back-to-back runs to the NCAA championship game in 2010 and 2011, an improbable achievement for a mid-sized private university competing against programs from much larger conferences with far greater athletic budgets. The university's Jordan College of Fine Arts and its pharmacy and health sciences programs have each built solid regional reputations, and Butler's small size, around 4,500 undergraduates, lets it maintain smaller class sizes than most larger public universities in the state. Butler's Indianapolis campus location gives students direct access to the city's business, healthcare, and sports industries, and the university's "Butler Way," an institutional phrase describing a deliberate emphasis on humility, teamwork, and thoughtful preparation, became closely associated with the culture head coach Brad Stevens built around the program's surprising basketball success. The university's combination of a genuinely competitive Division I basketball program at a relatively small private university, alongside strong pharmacy and business programs, has made Butler a distinctive choice among Indiana's private universities, gaining broader national name recognition than its size would otherwise suggest.

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• 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.