Davidson College in Davidson earned a top-10 spot among the best colleges in the country in WalletHub's 2027 rankings, placing the liberal arts school alongside peers like Wellesley, Pomona and Amherst.
The personal-finance site compared 68 colleges across 30 metrics grouped into seven categories: Student Selectivity, Cost & Financing, Faculty Resources, Campus Safety, Campus Experience, Educational Outcomes and Career Outcomes. Each metric was scored on a 100-point scale. Student Selectivity carried the most weight at 25 points, followed by Cost & Financing and Educational Outcomes at 20 points each.
Wellesley College topped the list, followed by Pomona College, Harvey Mudd College, Amherst College and Colby College. WalletHub excluded universities, which it defines as schools that offer graduate degree programs. A separate combined ranking of nearly 740 colleges and universities is also available on the site.
The ranking drew on data collected as of Sept. 14 from the National Center for Education Statistics, the Council for Community and Economic Research, the U.S. Department of Education, COLLEGEdata and PayScale. Metrics ranged from admission rate and test scores to student-faculty ratio, graduation rate and post-graduation salary.
Davidson College President Doug Hicks, a 1990 graduate, wrote in an Aug. 9 Fortune op-ed that 95% of the college's class of 2025 were employed or in graduate school within six months of graduation.
In that same piece, Hicks argued that a liberal arts education holds up in an economy reshaped by artificial intelligence. He wrote that "the skills employers value most … asking good questions, connecting ideas across disciplines and collaborating across differences … are exactly what a liberal arts education cultivates."
WalletHub's full methodology and individual school scores are available on its website. The data set covers metrics from net cost and student-loan default rates to the share of graduates who outearn workers with only a high school diploma.
