Babson Ranked the 10th Best College in America
Babson College was ranked the 10th best college in America by The Wall Street Journal in its WSJ/College Pulse 2024 Best Colleges in the U.S. rankings.
“This top-10 ranking is a clear validation of Babson’s strength in the market, not just in entrepreneurship and business education, but across all of higher education,” said Babson President Stephen Spinelli Jr. MBA’92, PhD. “This ranking represents a significant rise in the Journal’s standings, with Babson ranking in previous years just outside of the top 100 colleges in the country.”
Babson vaulted in the annual WSJ rankings this year, because of critical improvements to the ranking’s methodology, which expanded the importance of student outcomes with a focus on graduation rates and graduate salaries. It wrote: “Critically, we now put greater emphasis on measuring the value added by colleges—not simply measuring their students’ success, but focusing on the contribution the college makes to that success.”
By those measures, Babson cracked the top 10, putting the College in the company of the country’s elite universities. Princeton topped the rankings, followed by MIT, Yale, Stanford, and Columbia, as five Ivy League schools made the top 10, alongside Babson. Four Massachusetts schools landed in the top 10, including Babson, MIT, Harvard, and Amherst.
Babson also was ranked No. 10 for Salary Impact, validating again the College’s impressive student outcomes in the highly competitive higher education landscape.
For example, the Class of 2022 earned the highest starting salary ever for Babson undergraduates at $71,385, a 14% increase over the previous year. That starting salary is almost 18% above the projected average for business majors from the National Association of Colleges and Employers. Of the top 10 overall schools in the WSJ rankings, Babson has the fourth-highest earnings above a high-school graduate’s yearly salary, at $81,604.
On the graduate side, within three months of graduation, 84% of Babson’s Class of 2022 MBA graduates seeking employment received a job offer, earning an average U.S.-based salary of $116,935, a significant increase from previous years, with many earning an additional signing bonus averaging $32,773.
In its story, The Wall Street Journal emphasized Babson’s excellence at preparing students for successful careers, writing:
No. 10 Babson College aims to set its students up for success in the business world. Babson has business courses built into its core curriculum as well as a general emphasis on entrepreneurship. Freshmen are required to take a yearlong course called Foundations of Management and Entrepreneurship, where they launch and run a business venture with classmates. For sophomore Kaitlyn Pristawa ’26, that experience set the college apart from other schools she considered.
“You actually run a real business. People actually pay you for the products,” Pristawa says. “It teaches you about every aspect of business and makes you prepared for your future.”
The latest Wall Street Journal rankings agreed, vaulting Babson—the longtime No. 1 school for entrepreneurship—among the very best colleges in America.
“This stellar ranking comes at a time when many colleges and universities are facing steep enrollment challenges and broader questioning of the value of a college degree,” Spinelli said. “It is validating to see that the strategic vision that we created together as a community is yielding clear and definitive results for Babson.”
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