Forbes Names 10 Private Colleges to 2026 New Ivies List

Forbes published its 2026 New Ivies list on April 8, naming 10 private colleges whose alumni are highly rated by employers. The selection drew from a survey of more than 100 C-suite and hiring executives who evaluated schools on graduate quality and discussed how artificial intelligence is altering entry-level hiring.

Nearly 25% of the executives said AI would reduce their need for entry-level college graduates while 60% said it would change their staffing needs. One executive wrote that artificial intelligence has entirely redefined the anatomy of the entry level role and consequently the baseline for new hires has skyrocketed.

The list arrives as the job market for recent graduates shows signs of pressure. Researchers from Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab found that employment for those aged 22 to 25 in AI-vulnerable roles such as software engineers and customer service representatives had dropped 16% through October 2025.

As of December 2025, unemployment for new college graduates stood at 5.6%, compared with 4.2% for all workers, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

The 10 private schools named, listed alphabetically, are Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio; Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia; Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.; Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois; University of Notre Dame in Notre Dame, Indiana; Rice University in Houston, Texas; Tufts University in Medford and Somerville, Massachusetts; Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee; and Washington University in St.

Louis in St. Louis, Missouri. Their 2024 undergraduate enrollments range from 4,836 at Rice University to 10,421 at Northwestern University. Acceptance rates vary from 6% at Vanderbilt University to 37% at Case Western Reserve University. Median SAT scores for the group range from 1490 to 1550 while median ACT scores range from 33 to 35.

Schools on the list are adapting curricula across disciplines to prepare students for an AI-influenced workplace. Purdue University, named as a public New Ivy, became the first U.S. college in December 2025 to announce an AI working competency as a graduation requirement.

Magnus Egerstedt, provost of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told Forbes that success in the age of AI has more to do with the liberal arts than with traditional high-tech disciplines. He said the focus should be on foundations in a subject combined with creativity, curiosity and problem solving.

A C-suite respondent told Forbes that the most promising talents today are beginning to emerge from institutions that prioritize intellectual rigor over inherited prestige. The executive added that ideal graduates will have cultivated complex emotional intelligence, radical adaptability and visionary creativity to orchestrate AI tools rather than compete with them.

Stanford researchers noted in a November 2025 paper that while employment fell in jobs where AI primarily automates tasks, it continued to grow in roles where AI augments human work. The New Ivies list was first launched in 2024 amid employer questions about the recruiting value of Ivy League degrees.

This year, 37% of surveyed executives said they are less likely to hire Ivy League graduates than they were five years ago while 42% said they are more likely to hire graduates of public universities. The Ivy League consists of Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Penn, Princeton and Yale.