Federal Data · No Paid Rankings
Best Colleges in Illinois
Top Illinois colleges ranked by what actually matters after graduation: earnings, completion rates, and what you actually pay. Federal data. No surveys, no sponsorships.
How We Rank Illinois Colleges
Rankings use a composite score from federal data: graduate earnings (28%), graduation rate (25%), social mobility via Pell Grant share (20%), debt burden (15%), and net cost for low-income students (12%). Where a school has not reported one of these, that component is dropped and the remaining weights are rescaled rather than filled in with an estimate. Two adjustments apply: the earnings component is reduced by 13% for schools where graduate students are more than 20% of enrollment and by 25% where they are more than 30%, and a school with no net price on file for families earning up to $30,000 is scored on its overall average net price instead. Only 4-year non-profit schools with sufficient data qualify.
- →Earnings: Median annual earnings 10 years after enrollment. Source: College Scorecard.
- →Graduation rate: Full-time first-time students completing within 150% of normal time. Source: IPEDS.
- →Net price: Average annual cost after all grants and scholarships. Source: IPEDS.
- →Social mobility: Share of students receiving Pell Grants, a direct measure of access for low-income students. Source: IPEDS.
- →Debt burden: Median federal loan debt at graduation. Source: College Scorecard.
Top 10 Colleges in Illinois (2026)
Ranked by composite: earnings, graduation rate, social mobility, debt, affordability.
| # | School | Earnings (10yr) |
|---|---|---|
| 1 |  University of Chicago Chicago, IL | $91,885 |
| 2 |  Northwestern University Evanston, IL | $89,363 |
| 3 |  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Champaign, IL | $81,054 |
| 4 |  University of Illinois Chicago Chicago, IL | $68,740 |
| 5 | Saint Xavier University Chicago, IL | $58,656 |
| 6 |  Illinois Institute of Technology Chicago, IL | $82,592 |
| 7 | Trinity International University-Illinois Deerfield, IL | $46,989 |
| 8 | Elmhurst University Elmhurst, IL | $61,462 |
| 9 |  Illinois State University Normal, IL | $62,117 |
| 10 |  University of St Francis Joliet, IL | $63,926 |
56 Illinois schools in dataset. Top 10 shown. Data: IPEDS + College Scorecard. Updated annually.
All 56 Colleges in the Dataset
The ranking above shows the top 10 by composite score. Every school in the full dataset is listed here so you can explore beyond the top results.
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