In January, Amazon announced it would be cutting 16,000 corporate jobs just a few months after paring its staff by 14,000. During that same month, UPS said it would shed up to 30,000 white collar positions this year. Just last week, Oracle began a big round of layoffs (estimates are up to 30,000) even as the enterprise software giant is investing tens of billions in artificial intelligence.
Yet even before such layoff announcements started making headlines, AI had begun disrupting the market for young workers. Researchers from Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab found employment of those aged 22 to 25 in the most AI-vulnerable jobs, such as software engineers and customer service reps, had dropped 16% through last October, even as other age groups were still hanging on. In fact, in a reversal of historic norms, overall unemployment for new college grads has recently been higher than the average for all U.S. workers; as of December, young grads had a 5.6% unemployment rate, versus 4.2% for all workers, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York reports.
Bottom line: The nation’s colleges will have to adapt to justify their high sticker prices (some exceeding $90,000 a year) and produce educated workers capable of paying off their hefty student debt.
But how? Some early insights come from Forbes’ third annual list of the New Ivies–20 top schools (10 private and 10 public) whose alums rate highly with employers. The honorees were chosen with input from a survey of more than 100 C-Suite and hiring executives, who this year were asked not only to rate schools, but also how AI was changing their hiring of new grads.
Nearly 25% of these executives said AI would reduce their need for entry level college graduates and 60% said it would change their staffing needs. “Artificial intelligence has entirely redefined the anatomy of the entry level role. Consequently, the baseline for new hires has skyrocketed and lessened our need for traditional entry level headcount,” wrote one C-suite level executive.
Not surprisingly, given how highly they rate with employers, the 20 schools on our list are all rushing to prepare their students and adapt their curriculum, in a variety of ways–and across all disciplines. In December, Indiana’s Purdue University, a public New Ivy, became the first college in the U.S. to announce an “AI working competency” graduation requirement.
“The most promising talents today are beginning to emerge from institutions that prioritize intellectual rigor over inherited prestige,” observed one of our C-suite respondents, adding that the ideal graduate entering the workforce in the age of AI will have successfully completed an education that’s cultivated uniquely human traits including “complex emotional intelligence, radical adaptability and visionary creativity to orchestrate AI tools rather than compete with them.”
A similar perspective was offered to Forbes by Magnus Egerstedt, a robotics expert who last November was appointed provost of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a three-time public New Ivy winner. “Being successful [in the age of AI] has more to do with the liberal arts than with traditional high-tech disciplines,” says Egerstedt, who spent two decades as a professor of engineering, but is predicting a liberal arts renaissance. “So we're really leaning in hard on this idea of you need good foundations in something and then we focus on creativity, curiosity, problem solving.” The Stanford researchers, in their November paper observed that while young workers were losing out in jobs where AI primarily automates work, employment was still growing in roles where AI augments human production.
It should come as no surprise that the New Ivies are leaders in AI adoption, given their focus on workforce preparation. Forbes launched the list in 2024 amid growing employer skepticism about whether Ivy League diplomas still guaranteed the best recruits, and a spreading conviction that many of the smartest, hardest working kids were to be found at rigorous state flagship universities and some lesser known private schools.
That Ivy League-wariness persists, with 37% of respondents this year saying they are less likely to hire Ivy League grads than they were five years ago, and only 6% saying they’re more likely to do so. Those numbers are reversed for public universities, with 42% saying they’re more likely to hire these grads and just 6% less likely to do so. Grads of private colleges that aren’t part of the Ivy, or Ivy-Plus category, also fare better on these questions than those who are. (The Ivy League includes eight East Coast schools: Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Penn, Princeton and Yale. The “Ivy Plus” grouping is less fixed and this year we defined it to include five schools: Stanford, MIT, Duke, the University of Chicago and John Hopkins.)
You can read more about our methodology here and more about how the 2026 New Ivies are adapting to the world that AI is making after the list. Schools are listed alphabetically. Numbers are for 2024 and are drawn from the National Center for Education Statistics.
THE NEW IVIES: PRIVATE
Carnegie Mellon University
Location: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Undergraduate Enrollment: 7,852
Acceptance Rate: 12%
Median SAT Score: 1540
Median ACT Score: 35
Case Western Reserve University
Location: Cleveland, Ohio
Undergraduate Enrollment: 6,354
Acceptance Rate: 37%
Median SAT Score: 1510
Median ACT Score: 34
Emory University
Location: Atlanta, Georgia
Undergraduate Enrollment: 7,805
Acceptance Rate: 11%
Median SAT Score: 1520
Median ACT Score: 34
Georgetown University
Location: Washington, D.C.
Undergraduate Enrollment: 8,537
Acceptance Rate: 13%
Median SAT Score: 1490
Median ACT Score: 33
Northwestern University
Location: Evanston, Illinois
Undergraduate Enrollment: 10,421
Acceptance Rate: 8%
Median SAT Score: 1540
Median ACT Score: 34
University of Notre Dame
Location: Notre Dame, Indiana
Undergraduate Enrollment: 9,157
Acceptance Rate: 11%
Median SAT Score: 1520
Median ACT Score: 34
Rice University
Location: Houston, Texas
Undergraduate Enrollment: 4,836
Acceptance Rate: 8%
Median SAT Score: 1550
Median ACT Score: 35
Tufts University
Location: Medford and Somerville, Massachusetts
Undergraduate Enrollment: 7,715
Acceptance Rate: 11%
Median SAT Score: 1510
Median ACT Score: 34
Vanderbilt University
Location: Nashville, Tennessee
Undergraduate Enrollment: 7,285
Acceptance Rate: 6%
Median SAT Score: 1540
Median ACT Score: 35
Washington University in St Louis
Location: St. Louis, Missouri
Undergraduate Enrollment: 9,064
Acceptance Rate: 12%
Median SAT Score: 1540
Median ACT Score: 34
THE NEW IVIES: PUBLIC
United States Air Force Academy
Location: Colorado Springs, Colorado
Undergraduate Enrollment: 5,117
Acceptance Rate: 14%
Median SAT Score: 1330
Median ACT Score: 30
University of Florida
Location: Gainesville, Florida
Undergraduate Enrollment: 38,246
Acceptance Rate: 24%
Median SAT Score: 1400
Median ACT Score: 31
Georgia Institute of Technology
Location: Atlanta, Georgia
Undergraduate Enrollment: 20,887
Acceptance Rate: 14%
Median SAT Score: 1480
Median ACT Score: 33
University of Michigan
Location: Ann Arbor, Michigan
Undergraduate Enrollment: 34,962
Acceptance Rate: 16%
Median SAT Score: 1460
Median ACT Score: 33
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Location: Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Undergraduate Enrollment: 21,906
Acceptance Rate: 15%
Median SAT Score: 1480
Median ACT Score: 31
Purdue University
Location: West Lafayette, Indiana
Undergraduate Enrollment: 42,745
Acceptance Rate: 50%
Median SAT Score: 1350
Median ACT Score: 31
University of Texas at Austin
Location: Austin, Texas
Undergraduate Enrollment: 44,663
Acceptance Rate: 27%
Median SAT Score: 1390
Median ACT Score: 31
University of Virginia
Location: Charlottesville, Virginia
Undergraduate Enrollment: 19,033
Acceptance Rate: 17%
Median Score: 1480
Median ACT Score: 33
William & Mary
Location: Williamsburg, Virginia
Undergraduate Enrollment: 7,465
Acceptance Rate: 34%
Median SAT Score: 1470
Median ACT Score: 33
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Location: Madison, Wisconsin
Undergraduate Enrollment: 39,637
Acceptance Rate: 45%
Median SAT Score: 1460
50th Percentile ACT Score: 31
Each of the 20 outstanding institutions on this list reports that AI fluency has become a critical learning outcome, though their approaches vary widely. Integration of the new technology at a large state university like Georgia Tech, which already requires foundational computer science coursework for all students, looks different than it does at a smaller private university with liberal arts as well as science majors.
At Houston’s Rice University, a New Ivy for the third year in a row, students in upper division data science courses are tasked with making different AI models like ChatGPT and Claude debate each other and then assessing their arguments. Across campus in an introductory English course, professors ask students to write an essay and afterwards prompt an AI model to write on the same subject. Then, they’re required to discuss the different biases displayed in the machine and human created products.
“AI won’t fully replace all those entry-level jobs, but those people that know how to use AI will replace those that don't know how to use AI,” says Rice University provost Amy Dittmar.
The two newcomers on the Forbes New Ivy list, Case Western Reserve University in Ohio and the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado, are also forging ahead in AI. Private Case Western has tripled the number of AI courses it offers to over 100 across 40 departments and is creating opportunities for students to gain hands-on experience with prospective employers. Its Weatherhead School of Management offers courses where teams of students are paired with local businesses—including Hyland Software, KeyBank, Penske and Dataswift—to build AI solutions for them.
The Air Force Academy now requires all freshmen to take an introductory computing and cyber operations course and last year opened an “Innovation Center” dedicated to providing students hands-on research and training in advanced technologies including AI.
As is often the case in academia, big gifts from wealthy donors have jump-started some universities’ efforts. Back in 2020, Nvidia cofounder and alumnus Chris Malachowsky donated $50 million (partly in the form of Nvidia hardware) to the University of Florida, a two-time public New Ivy, with the goal of leapfrogging it into AI research. The school now encourages all students to earn a nine-credit AI Fundamentals & Applications Certificate, as well as specific AI certificates in disciplines like tourism and hospitality, public health and healthcare and the arts. “AI is going to change every major and every occupation. Students in all majors and all occupations need to be prepared to address this,” says provost Joe Glover.
While AI has harmed some grads’ job prospects, it’s bolstered opportunities for those with the strongest AI credentials. At Carnegie Mellon, a private Pittsburgh university on the list for three years, director of employer relations Sean McGowan reports the number of new CMU grads landing jobs right out of college with AI in the job title—designations such as “AI engineer” or “AI analyst”—hit 100 in 2025, double the number from the previous year. “Our employers are starting to offer more entry-level AI related roles, and we can see nationally that AI is being included in job descriptions more than ever before,” says McGowan, noting that these roles are not only engineering-specific positions but also analytical and operational roles in business.
One other, albeit older, group that’s prospering on the New Ivies campuses: professors with AI expertise. The University of Florida, Notre Dame and Emory have all hired upwards of 40 new staff focused on AI in recent years. Purdue and the University of Wisconsin-Madison each plan to add 50 new faculty positions in AI before 2030. And in February, the University of Texas at Austin announced plans to hire 50 faculty members for a newly created School of Computing. One aim of the expansion: Making computing and AI education more broadly available to students in all majors.