"There are some changes at the top of Forbes’ America’s Top Colleges list this year. Harvard remains in the No. 1 slot, but Yale is No. 2 and Stanford, No. 3, switching places since last year. MIT and Princeton are No. 4 and No. 5, also switching from the 2017 list.
But those are minor blips. More surprising is that for the first time a state school, the University of California, Berkeley, is as high as No. 14 (up from No. 29 last year), and that California makes such a strong showing near the top of the list. After Stanford, California Institute of Technology, a private STEM-focused school where 95% of undergraduates participate in research, ranks No. 6. Private Pomona College is at No. 19, and Harvey Mudd is at No. 23. Both schools are in the five-school Claremont Colleges consortium 35 miles east of downtown Los Angeles. One other public school ranks in the top 25, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, at No. 22.
Other top-ranked public schools include the University of Virginia at No. 34, College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, VA, at No. 43 and University of California, Los Angeles, at No. 46. UCLA was the most applied-to college in the country last year, with 113,000 applications for the fall 2018 freshman class (it admitted 14%)."
https://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2018/08/21/here-are-americas-top-colleges-for-2018/?share=9c4597bc#1c7236c83710