For our seventh annual ranking of the best colleges in America, 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 survey 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.
This year, Massachusetts Institute of Technology tops our list after a brief hiatus from the No. 1 spot. Stanford, last year's top school, slips to No. 2; Harvard, Princeton, and CalTech round out the top five.
Read on to see which schools make the cut:
Mike Nudelman/Business Insider