Pitt dubbed ‘public Ivy’ in new Forbes list

As employers seek top graduates across the country, a Forbes list may give Pitt students seeking jobs added prestige.

The University of Pittsburgh made the March 26 list of public and private universities named “New Ivies” by Forbes magazine, becoming one of 10 public universities in the country and the only public university in Pennsylvania to earn the title.

To determine which schools to include in the list of New Ivies, Forbes generated a list of all four-year, not-for-profit colleges in the United States that award degrees. The magazine used recent data from the National Center for Educational Statistics, according to Christina Magrini, vice president of corporate communications at Forbes Magazine. 

Forbes then removed the “traditional” Ivy League schools — Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Penn, Princeton and Yale — from the list, in addition to Stanford, MIT, Duke and the University of Chicago, the four “Ivy plus” colleges. 

To make the list of “new Ivies,” public colleges had to fall within certain enrollment and admission rates, enrolling at least 4,000 students and admitting fewer than 50% of yearly applicants.

Magrini said both public and private universities must also require high standardized test scores for admission. 

“The private Forbes New Ivies admit students with a median SAT of 1530 and a median ACT of 34,” Magrini said. “The public schools admit students with a median SAT of 1410 and a median ACT of 32. The schools that met all three criteria were put in front of employers in a survey to subscribers to Forbes’ C-suite newsletters.”

In addition to Pitt, the other schools named public Ivies are the Georgia Institute of Technology, Purdue University, the University of Texas at Austin, the United States Military Academy, the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign, the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Virginia and the College of William and Mary.

Provost and Senior Vice Chancellor Joseph McCarthy said the University is “honored” to be recognized as a New Ivy by Forbes.

“We’re proud to be a top-ranked, public institution with a focus on world-class research, academic excellence and equipping every student with real-world skills,” McCarthy said. “This recognition is another proof point that anything is possible at Pitt.”