Best colleges for future leaders remains an exclusive club

Here is a higher ed ranking that’s still dominated by the elites. Unlike some other lists, the 125 best colleges and universities for future leaders remain a pretty exclusive club.

It’s one of the most glaring gaps persisting in higher education, according to Time and Statista, which compile the annual list. Researchers analyzed the resumes of 4,000 “top U.S. leaders,” twice as many as last year. They also expanded the positions and sectors, now comprising CEOs of Fortune 500 companies and top corporate HR and diversity officers along with leaders from government, sports, AI, mission-driven nonprofits and religious organizations.

“This wide array of leaders was still most likely to have attended an Ivy League university or a similarly prestigious school,” researcher Jeremy Gantz noted. “But look below the top 20 slots and a more complex picture of where top U.S. leaders emerge from comes into view.”

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Flagship public universities, liberal arts colleges and HBCUs did make the list. For example, The University of Pittsburgh, Howard University and the University of Hawai’i System ranked in the top 50.

Though business leaders have been recruiting more widely to diversify their employee pipelines, the shift is not yet evident in the highest ranks of leadership in corporate America.

“Even as some organizations embrace more expansive recruiting approaches, there’s no reason to think demand for graduates of top-tier universities is ebbing,” the report explains. “Business schools at so-called Ivy Plus universities are still watching scores of freshly minted MBAs head into the finance, tech, and consulting sectors—all top fields for producing high-profile leaders.”

Here are the top 25 and their overall scores.

1. Harvard University (100)
2. Stanford University (89.80)
3. Yale University (85.34)
4. University of Pennsylvania (84.64)
5. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (84.55)
6. Columbia University (83.74)
7. University of California, Berkeley (83.45)
8. New York University (82.03)
9. Princeton University (81.95)
10.  Georgetown University (81.91)
11. Northwestern University (80.93)
12. University of Michigan (80.85)
13. University of Chicago (79.82)
14. Cornell University (79.38)
15. University of Virginia (79.01)
16. Dartmouth College (78.92)
17. University of Southern California (78.57)
18. Brown University (78.54)
19. University of California, Los Angeles (78.42)
20. Duke University (78.28)
21. University of Texas at Austin (78.060
22. University of Wisconsin-Madison (77.47)
23. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (77.27)
24. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (77.21)
25. Carnegie Mellon University (77.19)