The 48 best colleges in the northeastern US

We recently released our seventh annual list of the best colleges in America, which included schools from all over the US.

We decided to narrow that list down to take a closer look at the top colleges in just the northeast.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology still occupied the No. 1 spot. Harvard slid up one notch to take Stanford's place at No. 2, and Princeton moved up a spot to round out the top three.

To determine the rankings, we asked over 1,000 Business Insider readers to choose the colleges that best prepare their students for success after graduation. We then combined those results with each school's average SAT score from the college-data website College Board and the median starting salary from the employer-information website PayScale to come up with the final ranking. You can read the full methodology here.

Read on to see the top schools in the northeast.

Find out how your salary stacks up on PayScale.