Forbes’ “New Ivies” Public and Private Universities, 2026

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Georgia Tech has been there since I graduated in the 80;s and had been for a couple of decades before that. Engineering schools are always shortchanged in the US News shite. Schools should be ranked based on % of students in majors that are ranked top 10 of their major rankings. Tech hits about 70% on that metric, because they have at least half a dozen majors in the top 2 of the major. There are places ranked above Tech but Tech takes a back seat to no one.

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My wife’s grandfather was an engineering professor at Georgia Tech, and I have a buddy who graduated from there. It’s an excellent school…

Everyone should spend a couple of minutes and glean through the article why these universities were selected as "New Ivies" .
I've C+P a few paragraphs that will give you the gist. It's a changing world out there with the AI. If your job requires you to stare at a computer screen and mash keys on a keyboard, you're job is probably not needed any longer. I'm sure new ones will pop up, we just don't know what they are yet. It'll be the task of these new graduates to figure out new jobs and AI applications for them.

From the article.
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Bottom line: The nation’s colleges will have to adapt to justify their high sticker prices (some exceeding $90,000 a year) and produce educated workers capable of paying off their hefty student debt.

But how? Some early insights come from Forbes’ third annual list of the New Ivies–20 top schools (10 private and 10 public) whose alums rate highly with employers. The honorees were chosen with input from a survey of more than 100 C-Suite and hiring executives, who this year were asked not only to rate schools, but also how AI was changing their hiring of new grads.

Nearly 25% of these executives said AI would reduce their need for entry level college graduates and 60% said it would change their staffing needs. “Artificial intelligence has entirely redefined the anatomy of the entry level role. Consequently, the baseline for new hires has skyrocketed and lessened our need for traditional entry level headcount,” wrote one C-suite level executive.

Not surprisingly, given how highly they rate with employers, the 20 schools on our list are all rushing to prepare their students and adapt their curriculum, in a variety of ways–and across all disciplines. In December, Indiana’s Purdue University, a public New Ivy, became the first college in the U.S. to announce an “AI working competency” graduation requirement.

“The most promising talents today are beginning to emerge from institutions that prioritize intellectual rigor over inherited prestige,” observed one of our C-suite respondents, adding that the ideal graduate entering the workforce in the age of AI will have successfully completed an education that’s cultivated uniquely human traits including “complex emotional intelligence, radical adaptability and visionary creativity to orchestrate AI tools rather than compete with them.”

I went to Rice for grad school. Hard to imagine anyone in the actual Ivy League being too much smarter than some of the folks at Rice.

My daughter is a junior in high school and we are dealing with all the parents of her friends and the suburbia moms

Every time we are together, all they do is compare what schools their kid is looking at. Most out of state and will be spending 75k a year just to put the “my kid goes to ____” on their car

One of her friends is looking at going to fashion school in Paris. It would be 125 a year.

It’s amazing these people willing to be 250-500k in debt in a job market that nobody knows how it will be in 5 years with AI

We are just looking at normal state schools with a goal of just getting a degree and not being in debt the rest of my life

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It is nuts. I have a senior and he's doing community college since it's 100% free to get his basics out of the way, then transferring to a state school.

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I’m not trying to pressure her, but it would be the best thing for her to do. She can ride a bike to the community college. It’s so close.

She will also graduate at 17 and has dyslexia. She would benefit so much from an extra year to live at home and make some money.

It’s just ridiculous nowadays with kids doing social media selection shows to say where they are going

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I have one daughter graduating from BYU and my other daughter starting in August.

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You good with soaking?

Genius! Let’s take a few examples and extrapolate that out to an entire population! Is there nowhere free from comments like yours, particularly in a thread about education?

This is a good topic.

It’s interesting because both can be true.

Anthropic CEO says they want to hire Classics majors.

But the majority of kids would be well served to look at the career skills you listed. Which allows for them to start their own business if they don’t get hired.

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Ai is about to get it all. Colleges would be smart to move away from classic degrees and teach things that work in the real world like Construction Management, Concrete Management, Oil Industry, Real Ag not classroom bs, Landscape Management, Aviation such Pilot, Controller, Airport Management, etc.. Teach actual careers not concepts.

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I disagree somewhat.

You've already seen a huge drop in information on the actual Internet since these LLMs have released. They learn much of their information off the Internet, so if the Internet has less of that information the models aren't learning anything new. So unless we have one market leader that emerges and something like 80-85% of users use it, we have these emerging data silos.

As for the degrees, the gap once AI is in widespread use and actually taking jobs will be finding people who actually know about the topic you're asking about to run them. They are really only as effective as the pilot at this point. If you know about the topic and know how to do what you're asking it, you'll get better quality data. So people might actually need more schooling to compete and be effective employees.

Now don't get me wrong, I've thought that it's much better to get a degree that gives you a clear career path upon graduation like engineering even before this. I think that will remain the best path. But we will have a shortage of people who actually know about certain other topics without referencing AI, and those people will be paid handsomely. Meanwhile the people who do nothing to separate themselves will have their jobs culled. The demand for experience and knowledge will only go up but the path to gaining both will get harder and more competitive.