BRIDGEPORT, Pa. — 35 institutions that field a men’s varsity/women’s varsity/men’s collegiate club/women’s collegiate club team in the Collegiate Water Polo Association (CWPA)/Mid-Atlantic Water Polo Conference (MAWPC)/Northeast Water Polo Conference (NWPC) were among 50 schools recognized on the inaugural/2025 Linkedin Top 50 Colleges for Career Success list.
LinkedIn’s first-ever Top Colleges ranking identifies the 50 U.S. schools that best set graduates up for long-term success. The ranking is built on exclusive LinkedIn data looking at career outcomes of alumni, such as job placement rates and advancement into senior-level positions, or how many alumni held an internship during their degree or started their own company post-grad.
Methodology
LinkedIn used data to rank U.S. colleges based on five pillars: job placement; internships and recruiter demand; career success; network strength; and knowledge breadth. Job placement tracks the percentage of alumni from recent graduate cohorts (2019-2024) that start a full-time position or a graduate school program within the same year of graduating. This assessment is based on LinkedIn hiring data. Internships and recruiter demand tracks the percentage of alumni from recent cohorts who completed an undergraduate internship; and labor market demand for recent cohorts, based on InMail outreach data. Career success tracks the percentage of alumni with post-graduate entrepreneurship or C-suite experience. Network strength tracks how connected alumni of the same school are to each other, as well as how connected alumni from recent cohorts are to all past alumni and current students. Knowledge breadth tracks unique fields of study and unique skills gained among recent cohorts during their degree.
Each of the five pillars is weighed equally. Most pillars are made up of two metrics, each accounting for half of that pillar’s weight — except for job placement, which is based on a single metric accounting for the full weight of the pillar.
To be eligible, colleges must be U.S.-based, regionally accredited four-year baccalaureate programs that are actively enrolling first-year students. Programs must have at least 2,000 total alumni, with at least 500 of them graduating within the recent cohort (2019-2024), based on LinkedIn data. We exclude military service academies, for-profit colleges, highly-specialized colleges and colleges that offer only online programs or degree completion programs from our analysis. Depending on the specific metric in question, our methodology either encompasses all alumni or recent graduate cohorts, as defined by alumni who graduated between 2019 and 2024. This analysis represents the world seen through the lens of LinkedIn data, drawn from the anonymized and aggregated profile information of LinkedIn’s members around the world.
2025 Linkedin Top 50 United States Colleges
- 1. Princeton University (Men’s Varsity/Women’s Varsity)
- 2. Duke University (Men’s Club/Women’s Club)
- 3. University of Pennsylvania (Men’s Club/Women’s Club)
- 4. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Men’s Varsity/Women’s Club)
- 5. Cornell University (Men’s Club/Women’s Club)
- 6. Harvard University (Men’s Varsity/Women’s Varsity)
- 7. Babson College
- 8. University of Notre Dame (Men’s/Women’s Club)
- 9. Dartmouth College (Men’s/Women’s Club)
- 10. Stanford University (Men’s Club)
- 11. Northwestern University (Men’s/Women’s Club)
- 12. University of Virginia (Men’s/Women’s Club)
- 13. Vanderbilt University
- 14. Brown University (Men’s Varsity/Women’s Varsity
- 15. Bentley University
- 16. Tufts University (Men’s Club/Women’s Club)
- 17. Lehigh University (Men’s Club)
- 18. Columbia University (Men’s Club/Women’s Club)
- 19. Yale University (Men’s Club/Women’s Club)
- 20. Carnegie Mellon University (Men’s Club/Women’s Club)
- 21. Bucknell University (Men’s Varsity/Women’s Varsity)
- 22. Boston College (Men’s Club/Women’s Club)
- 23. Villanova University (Men’s Club)
- 24. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (Men’s Club/Women’s Club)
- 25. Wake Forest University
- 26. University of Chicago
- 27. University of Southern California (Men’s Club/Women’s Club)
- 28. Fairfield University
- 29. Washington and Lee University
- 30. University of California-Berkeley (Men’s Club/Women’s Club)
- 31. Rice University (Men’s Club/Women’s Club)
- 32. Georgetown University (Men’s Club/Women’s Club)
- 33. Purdue University (Men’s Club/Women’s Club)
- 34. University of Michigan-Ann Arbor (Women’s Varsity/Men’s Club/Women’s Club)
- 35. Miami University (Ohio) (Men’s Club/Women’s Club)
- 36. Colgate University (Men’s Club/Women’s Club)
- 37. Southern Methodist University
- 38. Bryant University
- 39. Worcester Polytechnic Institute (Men’s Club)
- 40. The Pennsylvania State University (Men’s Club/Women’s Club)
- 41. California Institute of Technology
- 42. Trinity College
- 43. Boston University (Men’s Club/Women’s Club)
- 44. University of Richmond
- 45. Stevens Institute of Technology
- 46. The University of Texas at Austin (Men’s Club/Women’s Club)
- 47. Indiana University Bloomington (Men’s Club)
- 48. Lafayette College
- 49. Providence College
- 50. University of Wisconsin-Madison (Men’s Club/Women’s Club)
