These Are The Top Colleges In Minnesota: Forbes

NORTHFIELD, MN — Carleton College is the fifth best college in the Midwest, according to Forbes' annual list. The 2017 list of best clleges, which was released on Wednesday, looks at what institutions give back to students on the money they spend on a college education. This year's rankings, as Forbes explains, were created to better align with what the magazine values most, "superior return on investment; high impact, leadership and success; and a first-rate student-consumer experience."

Forbes describes the rankings as "fiscally minded" and says they does not take into account things like campus atmosphere, Greek life, sports etc. The methodology favors variables like "alumni salary, graduation rate and student satisfaction." Post-graduate success accounted for 35 percent of the ranking; how effectively students at each school avoid or pay back student loan debt accounts for 20 percent of the rankings, as does the student experience. Graduation rate and academic success both account for 12.5 percent. (You can see the full methodology here.)

The colleges that crack the top 25 on Forbes' list of top colleges in the Midwest are:

1. University of Chicago
2. University of Notre Dame
3. Northwestern University
4. Washington University of St. Louis
5. Carleton College (Northfield, MN)
6. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
7. Oberlin College
8. Grinnell College
9. Kenyon College
10. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
11. University of Wisconsin, Madison
12. Macalester College (Saint Paul, MN)
13. St. Olaf College (Northfield, MN)
14. Case Western Reserve University
15. Wheaton College
16. Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
17. DePauw University
18. Denison University
19. The Ohio State University
20. Earlham College
21. University of Minnesota-Twin Cities
22. Kalamazoo College
23. Purdue University
24. Indiana University, Bloomington
25. Hillsdale College

Here are the colleges that crack the top 10 on Forbes' list of top colleges nationwide:

1. Harvard University
2. Stanford University
3. Yale University
4. Princeton University
5. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
6. California Institute of Technology
7. University of Pennsylvania
8. Duke University
9. Brown University
10. Pomona College

Feroze Dhanoa (Patch National Staff) contributed to this report.

Photo credit: AP Photo/Craig Lassig