MIT

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• Top 6 Colleges in Massachusetts

  Currently #2 · score 0

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• Harvard University

  Harvard University was founded in 1636, making it the oldest institution of higher education in the United States, chartered more than a century before the country itself existed and named after its first benefactor, clergyman John Harvard, who left the fledgling college his library and half his estate upon his death in 1638. Harvard's endowment, the largest of any university in the world at more than $50 billion, funds financial aid, research, and faculty recruiting at a scale no other academic institution can match, and its law, business, and medical schools are each consistently ranked among the very best in their respective fields. The university has produced more United States presidents than any other institution and has more Nobel laureates affiliated with it than almost any other university in the world, a combination of political and scientific influence that's made "Harvard" itself a shorthand, well beyond academia, for elite achievement. Harvard's extreme selectivity, admitting a small fraction of an application pool that regularly exceeds 50,000 students, combined with its historical depth and financial resources, is why it remains the university most people name first when asked to identify the single most prestigious school in the country.

• Williams College

  Williams College, founded in 1793 through the estate of Ephraim Williams, a colonial military officer killed in the French and Indian War, is consistently ranked as the number one liberal arts college in the country by US News & World Report, a distinction it has held more often than any other school since the rankings began. The college's "tutorial" system, in which small groups of two students meet weekly with a professor to debate and critique each other's work directly, is modeled on Oxford and Cambridge's teaching methods and gives Williams students a level of direct faculty engagement uncommon even among other elite liberal arts colleges. Williams's remote location in the Berkshires, in the small town of Williamstown, has fostered an unusually self-contained and close-knit residential campus culture, and the school's "Purple Bubble" nickname reflects both its physical isolation and the intensity of the community that forms within it. The college's endowment per student ranks among the very highest of any undergraduate institution in the country, funding need-blind admission and full-need financial aid, and its combination of top-ranked academics, small size, and financial resources has made it the benchmark liberal arts college nationally.

• Amherst College

  Amherst College, founded in 1821, has long been considered Williams College's closest rival for the title of best liberal arts college in the country, and the two schools' athletic rivalry, dating to an 1859 baseball game believed to be the first intercollegiate game ever played, is the oldest continuous college sports rivalry in the United States. The college's open curriculum, which imposes no distribution requirements beyond a single required first-year seminar, gives Amherst students more freedom to design their own academic path than almost any other selective liberal arts college, a distinctive approach the school has maintained for decades. Amherst was among the earliest highly selective liberal arts colleges to adopt need-blind admission for both domestic and international applicants, and its socioeconomic diversity relative to peer institutions is frequently cited by higher-education researchers as a model other elite colleges have since tried to replicate. The college's small size, fewer than 2,000 students, and its central Massachusetts location within the Five College Consortium — alongside Smith, Mount Holyoke, Hampshire, and UMass Amherst — give students access to a much broader range of courses and social life than the college's own enrollment alone would suggest.

• Wellesley College

  Wellesley College, founded in 1870, is one of the Seven Sisters women's colleges and has remained women's-only even as several of its sister institutions went coeducational, a deliberate choice the college has maintained on the premise that a single-sex environment produces disproportionate numbers of women in leadership roles. The college's alumnae include Hillary Clinton, Madeleine Albright, and a long list of other prominent political and business leaders, and Wellesley is frequently cited as having produced more women in significant leadership positions, relative to its size, than almost any other American institution. Wellesley's campus, built around Lake Waban, is considered one of the most beautiful in the country, and the school's small size and academic rigor let it maintain close faculty mentorship relationships that the college credits as central to its graduates' career outcomes. As part of the Boston-area academic consortium and with a formal cross-registration exchange with MIT, Wellesley students can take classes and access resources well beyond the college's own campus, combining the intimacy of a small women's college with access to one of the country's top research universities.

• Tufts University

  Tufts University, founded in 1852 on Walnut Hill straddling Medford and Somerville just outside Boston, has built a reputation for combining strong undergraduate liberal arts and engineering programs with the kind of specialized graduate schools more typical of a larger research university. The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts's graduate school of international affairs, is consistently ranked among the best in the world for international relations, and undergraduates can take Fletcher courses, giving Tufts a direct pipeline into foreign policy and diplomatic career paths uncommon at similarly sized universities. Tufts's location just a few miles from Boston and Cambridge gives students access to the city's academic and professional resources while maintaining a distinct, self-contained hilltop campus, and the university's size — larger than an elite liberal arts college but considerably smaller than nearby Harvard or MIT — occupies a deliberate middle ground between those two models. The university's combination of strong pre-med and international relations programs, alongside a well-regarded engineering school, has made it a consistent draw for students who want research-university breadth without the scale of Boston's largest institutions.