The 25 Smartest Colleges In America

Schools are constantly ranked on everything from the beauty of their campuses to their party scenes, but rarely on their students' intelligence.

Exclusively for Business Insider, Dr. Jonathan Wai, a Duke University Talent Identification Program research scientist and psychologist, computed a new ranking of America's colleges and universities based purely on smarts, as shown by the student body's average scores on standardized tests.

Though these tests are often criticized, research shows that both the SAT and ACT are excellent measures of general cognitive ability, and the scores of a school's student body give an accurate snapshot of their abilities.

Cognitive training company Lumosity took a crack at this last year, ranking more than 400 schools based on students' performance on their brain-training games.

There were a couple of problems with their list, however. They only had data available from students who played the games, meaning some of the smartest schools got ignored, and there's no peer-reviewed research showing their games are a reliable and valid measure of smarts.

Here are the real 25 smartest colleges in America, with Lumosity's rankings and U.S. News' most recent annual college rankings for comparison.

Read more about our methodology and reasoning.