Want a school that will engage your mind? Put Brigham Young University on your short list.
Looking for a diverse student body? The City University of New York’s City College could be for you.
How about a school rich enough to pour plenty of resources into your education? Head to Harvard University.
Focused on how well you’ll do after graduation? You can’t do better than Yale University.
And if you want all of the above and great weather to boot? Head west. Stanford University tops the inaugural Wall Street Journal/Times Higher Education College Rankings (paywall), thanks to its deep pockets, intellectually engaged students and solid student outcomes. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Columbia University round out the top three.
The WSJ/THE rankings offer students an invaluable guide because they pull back from the traditional emphasis on inputs — such as the average SAT scores of incoming freshmen or how many candidates were rejected — and place more weight on the students’ postgraduate success as well as their own opinions about the quality of their education.