How We Define Top Universities
From Ivy Plus and T-25 “tier lists” to endless rankings for specific college majors, our admissions experts in TransferPlus Advisors have seen many ways students, school administration, and the general public define what a “top university” is.
For us, we define it through several categories that ultimately fit the goals of our clients. In this article, we will show different ways top universities are defined, and how we define ours for our clients who aspire to transfer to the best schools they can.
The rankings we look at
We use commonly used rankings as a first point of reference to understand generally how selective and “prestigious” the schools are. When we talk with prospective and current students, we use a combination of these rankings to refer to a “top university.”
T-25
T-25, short for Top 25 schools based on U.S. News and World Report rankings, is so relied upon by transfer students that it created a subreddit in 2020. We don’t disagree that the rankings hold weight—typically, the higher-ranked schools have lower acceptance rates and offer more resources for students.
For us, the ranking helps us understand what schools are “considered” top schools, but we also know that the ranking, which changes every year dynamically except for a few top schools, can be seen as more important to students than it may seem. As much as we like talking about how some schools fell out of the rankings, students’ decisions should not be based on how the schools are ranked in these lists, especially since the schools may have different admissions policies for transfer students that make transferring almost impossible.
To see the latest top schools, please refer to the U.S. News and World Report’s website. An example is this 2025 National Universities ranking linked here. There are also other rankings like Times Higher Education and the Wall Street Journal, which publish national and international rankings.
Ivy Plus
To be elite doesn’t just mean that they are the top-ranked school. It means they have a storied history, vast connections, and an aura. The schools with the most prestige are often referred to as “Ivy Plus.”
Ivy Plus is not a standard phrase, meaning that different people have different opinions on what it includes. Some think that it can only be private universities in the Northeast, and others include public schools all over the country.
We at TransferPlus Advisors typically define it as selective private universities with as much—or sometimes more—prestige and reputation as Ivy League universities that offer similar resources to students. Here are the schools we include as “Ivy Plus” in no particular order:
All members of the Ivy League (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Dartmouth, Penn, Columbia, Cornell)
MIT, Duke, UChicago, Caltech, Northwestern, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, Wash U (St. Louis)
We never refer to a school as “Ivy Plus” just to make a recommendation, but we like recommending most of these schools as they offer the most financial aid to transfer students once accepted.
Public Ivies
Public Ivy was first coined in a book, Public Ivies: A Guide to America's Best Public Undergraduate Colleges and Universities, but became a phrase that advisors and parents like to use to describe a variety of schools.
We’re fans of public schools, because they tend to be the most transfer-friendly thanks to clear credit transfer policies and guaranteed admission for many community colleges. These transfer-friendly policies also create a large community of transfer students, including residential communities made just for them and academic advisors with experience specifically for transfer students. For these reasons, we always include these schools in the “target school list” that we create with our students.
In terms of the phrase “Public Ivy,” we typically avoid the phrase and instead try to be more specific. For example, we use the phrase Flagship University as it points to the state’s best university—both in ranking and funding—including UC Berkeley, University of Michigan Ann-Arbor, University of Virginia, and UNC Chapel Hill.
In California, most UC schools have guaranteed admissions from community colleges as long as the student maintains a GPA above a required line. However, schools like UCLA and UCSD do not offer automatic admission, and instead rely on a selective process. Those schools we refer to as Highly-Selective Public Universities.
Don’t forget the Liberal Arts Colleges
US News and World Report also maintains a ranking of liberal arts colleges, which we recommend you follow just as much as the ranking for Ivy Plus universities.
Liberal arts colleges often accept fewer transfer students as they are smaller schools. While that may seem objectively worse than the public universities with a large transfer population, it makes up for the difference by offering a unique experience and support. Schools that accept fewer transfer students don’t have a path to make everyone follow.
They should still have a history of accepting transfer students, so that they understand your unique challenges with credit transfers and financial aid. However, if you can advocate for yourself, smaller schools can be the most flexible to provide the specific help you need, whether it be tutoring help for classes, special opportunities to connect professors with students, or financial support.
We typically research a few liberal arts colleges with our clients to see if they prefer a truly unique, close-knit academic journey that smaller schools can offer better.
Adding the Transfer Nuance
Schools in the rankings we follow are just the first filter. The second filter we put before we recommend them is the schools’ stance on transfer admissions. As mentioned in our other blog post about different policies held by some schools that make transferring difficult, we can’t just trust that all T-25 or even Public Ivy schools will accept transfer students. The last thing we want is for a student to spend all their time dreaming and preparing for a school that never accepts transfer students.
Here are some examples, as of recent academic years, that we find hard to recommend for most students:
Harvard University and Princeton University: Harvard and Princeton only accept veterans and very rare, unique stories (including this one, which also interviewed our co-founder)
Columbia University: Its School of General Studies, which offers different (and often fewer) resources than its main undergraduate schools, is the school that accepts most of their transfer students. However, transfer admissions to its other undergraduate colleges seem to be improving, and we may start recommending Columbia in the coming few years.
Out-of-state public universities: If you’re in California, we cannot recommend UC Berkeley and UCLA enough. However, if you are in North Carolina, we would not recommend these University of California schools for several reasons: First, some states limit how many students can come from outside of their states (e.g., Virginia). Second, many of the schools do not have good financial aid for out-of-state students. These challenges exist for high school students, but as transfer students, the benefits of staying in-state (e.g., credits, more favorable acceptance rate) offer far more benefits than trying to go out of state.
How our advisors create a top school list for each student
Because different schools have different admissions policies, we prefer not to have a universal “top school” ranking. Instead, our advisors at TransferPlus Advisors work with each client to create a custom list of schools to aim for. Many of the students want to use the T-25 lists or images created by Ivy League reputations, and our advisors work with them to add the transfer nuance and also dive deeper into the students’ aspirations to ensure that the school offers the programs that they are interested in and that they can get in.
The initial consultation can be scheduled by answering our contact form here.