Brainiacs

Newsweek/The Daily Beast ranks the best of the best, the brightest of the bright, the nation’s schools with the most highly decorated students: America’s 25 Brainiac Schools.

Methodology: To find the schools where brainiacs flock and flourish, Newsweek/The Daily Beast weighted each of the following equally, using z-scores (how close or distant each school is to the average within each category): number of Rhodes scholars, all time; number of Marshall Scholarship winners, all time; number of Gates-Cambridge Scholarship winners since 2001; number of Truman Scholarship winners, all time; and the number of Fulbright Student Program awardees since 1993. To account for the possibility that more populous schools might have more opportunity to score these prestigious awards, each of the preceding were divided by current enrollment (enrollment data from the National Center for Education Statistics). We also equally weighted the percent of freshman who were in the top 10 percent of their high school class, the percent of applicants admitted, and SAT scores for math and reading, with data from NCES.