The Best 391 Colleges, 2026. By Robert Franek, David Soto, Stephen Koch, Aaron Riccio, Laura Rose, and the staff of The Princeton Review. Princeton Review/Penguin Random House. $26.99.
The value of a college degree has been taking a beating recently, with widespread concerns about potentially career-destroying artificial intelligence and worries about the work/life balance in traditional white-collar jobs combining to make families more seriously consider trade schools, apprenticeships, or simply urging high-school students to move into some sort of paying position immediately after graduation, if not before.
Ironically and surely unintentionally, this reconsideration of the economic value of post-high-school studies has actually increased the value of The Princeton Review’s data-driven, nearly 900-page annual guide to the “best” colleges, however defined. This is because the weighty tome allows students and families to individualize their definition of value, not only of a college degree itself but also of the overall college experience. True, The Best 391 Colleges, 2026 does not have a list of “best colleges for economic impact of graduates’ degrees” – that would be monumentally difficult to create, although it is actually a pretty good idea for the future, since it is the basis of the recent arguments about college’s “value.” But the book parses data and the comments of 170,000 students according to a different meaning of the word “value,” focusing on the internal values of schools and making it much easier for families to search for colleges whose orientation and focus match their own.
Thus, a family that believes a student’s future success likely lies in making connections through college instructors’ networks may gravitate to the list of the 25 schools with the “most accessible professors” – and will probably want to see how that list correlates with the one of schools where “professors get high marks.” Under that form of evaluation, Thomas Aquinas College (CA), Harvey Mudd College, Washington and Lee University, Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, and a few others appear on both lists and would be worth a deeper dive for families whose values align with the “networking” paradigm. A family that strongly believes the classroom, not the overall college experience, is where students need to be focused, may want to start with the colleges where “students study the most” – which is led by California Institute of Technology and includes several technology/engineering schools, but also highlights Grinnell College and Amherst College, neither of which is known for a strong emphasis on STEM subjects.
On the other hand, a family that cares deeply about ensuring that students get mental and emotional support while attending college may want to start with the schools with the “best student support and counseling services,” while ones most concerned with providing a student with an overall positive experience may turn to the list titled “Their Students Love These Colleges.” And families that believe that colleges themselves, rather than individual professors, are the gateway to post-college career success, may start with the schools listed as having “best career services.” And so forth.
All 50 categories of these lists are simply starting points, basic guidelines allowing parents and students alike to turn to the individual pages devoted to all the schools – two pages per school – for more-detailed information on academics, campus life, admissions, financial aid, and each college’s self-image (in a section called “The School Says: From the Admissions Office”). Comments on these various elements of the school are bracketed (literally, in terms of the book’s layout) by data on enrollment (including racial and gender percentages), selectivity, testing, deadlines for different types of applications (early decision, early action, etc.), and basic financial facts. Those last are of course crucial for families deciding how they will manage college costs and whether post-college life will justify the investment in higher education. The Best 391 Colleges, 2026 actually has some lists that can help with this endeavor, too: “Great Financial Aid” and “Financial Aid Not So Great.” But those two lists, even more than most, are starting points, since they must be correlated with the specific academic and campus-life elements of each school to determine whether a particular college is a good overall fit for any particular student. And both those lists are worth juxtaposing with the very useful back-of-the-book “Index of Schools by Tuition,” since generous financial aid at a super-expensive college may end up being little different from a family’s perspective from less-generous aid at a school whose “list price” costs are lower.
It is important to remember that the 391 colleges explored in this year’s book – whose numbering has, intentionally or not, gone up by one school every year since it stood at 385 in 2020 – are scarcely a student’s only options for higher education. The Best 391 Colleges, 2026 actually contains a separate “Best Regional Colleges” list containing “241 schools that we consider academically outstanding and well worth consideration in your college search.” And there are thousands of other colleges in the U.S. that will be a good fit for specific students whose values – financial, career-focused, geographical, sociopolitical or otherwise – align with those schools’ approaches to post-high-school education. So The Best 391 Colleges, 2026, like all its predecessors, cannot be more than a starting point, but it is a very good place to start searching for a worthwhile college experience, however defined. The landscape of discussion about college education continues to change and evolve, but despite that, when it comes to providing a suitable way for students and families to begin a search for a good educational match, this book has done it again, as it always does.
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