The 100 smartest private colleges in America

If you're looking for exclusivity, academic excellence, and exposure to the brainiest students in the US, you may want to check out the universities below.

We recently ranked the smartest colleges in America, and private institutions dominated the top of the list. The California Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago rank as Nos. 1 and 2, followed by the Ivies Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.

In order to determine a school's overall smarts, Jonathan Wai, a Duke University Talent Identification Program research scientist, analyzed the average standardized test scores that schools report to US News. (Those that did not report scores are not included.)

These tests are often criticized, but research shows that both the SAT and ACT are good measures of general cognitive ability, since just about any mental test measures one's ability to reason.

ACT scores were converted to SAT scores (math + verbal) using this concordance table so all schools could be compared on one metric. Then, an average of the 25th and 75th percentile was computed (see more detail on methods and limitations here).

On the following ranking, a (2) next to the school's name indicates that some or all students aren't required to supply scores; a (3) indicates that the school did not supply all students it has scores for, or did not tell US News if it had; a (4) indicates that the data is from a previous year, rather than from the most recent year; and a (9) indicates that the school may not require scores from all applicants and that it may not have submitted data for all students.

Here are the smartest private colleges in America: