When researchers study selective colleges, they often use a group of 200 to 250 colleges, based on categories chosen by Barron’s, which publishes a popular college guide. I have cited such research in several recent articles and wanted to provide the list of those colleges.  The first thing many people will notice about the list is that it includes a broad array of colleges: public and private, large and small, extremely selective and less so. Selective colleges — as higher-education researchers tend to define them — are not just the Ivy League, Stanford, Duke and the other usual suspects. They’re also Virginia Tech, the University of Pittsburgh, Ohio State, Texas A&M, Bard, Fordham, New College of Florida, the Colorado School of Mines and five University of California campuses.  New York has the most colleges on the list, with 29. Thirteen states do not have a college on the list: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Hawaii, Idaho, Kansas, Montana, Nevada, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming.  The main importance of this list is not that a degree from these colleges is enormously more valuable than a degree from less selective colleges. Some research finds that the college from which people graduate has little to no effect on their long-term prospects. The list matters, instead, because more selective colleges tend to have more resources than unselective colleges — and much higher graduation rates.  All else equal, students who attend less selective colleges are much less likely to graduate, according to a large recent study, which was published as a book, “Crossing the Finish Line.” On average, workers with a bachelor’s degree earn about 40 percent more per week than workers who attended some college but did not complete a four-year degree. Workers with a four-year degree are also much more likely to be working.  Perhaps most worrisome, many high-achieving, low-income students do not attend a selective college, despite their qualifications, and ultimately do not receive a bachelor’s degree. Among the top 4 percent of students in the high school class of 2008, based on test scores and grades, only 34 percent of those from low-income households attended a selective college, according to Caroline Hoxby and Christopher Avery.  The list of selective colleges here spans Barron’s four top designations: most competitive, highly competitive plus, highly competitive and very competitive plus. Next to each college’s name appears its Barron’s designation, which is based on the entering students’ grades and test scores, and the state in which the college is located.  In their recent studies on low-income students, Ms. Hoxby, Mr. Avery and Sarah Turner used a universe of colleges spanning all four categories. In other work, by Anthony Carnevale of Georgetown, the definition spanned only the first three categories, which reduced the list by about 50 colleges, to slightly less than 200.  Mr. Carnevale and Jeff Strohl, both of the Center —on Education and the Workforce at Georgetown, provided us with the Barron’s data. The version shown here comes from the 2009 guide and includes the 236 colleges in the top four selectivity categories. The list is grouped by state, though readers can also sort colleges alphabetically or by selectivity group.
Studies of selective colleges &#8212; which have more resources and higher graduation rates than others &#8212; are often based on 200 to 250 institutions based on categories chosen by Barron&#8217;s.