Everyone Agrees On The Most Important Reason To Go To College

We recently published our annual list of the Best Colleges in America, based on a survey of more than 1,500 professionals with hiring experience in a variety of fields.

Our readers voted Stanford as the best college in America, pushing MIT to second place after a four-year reign.

In addition to asking respondents to rank the business schools, we also asked them more general questions about college, including the question: "What is the most valuable asset college provides?"

Somewhat surprisingly, everyone agreed that academics, not brand value or network, is the most important reason to attend college. Respondents ranked "brand value" second, "network" third, "workplace skills" fourth, and "social experience" fifth.

When we filtered the results to only include responses from people working in the finance industry, we found that they had the same opinion as all survey respondents.

Then we filtered the results to only include people who work in tech. These respondents also ranked academics over the other choices, though they ranked both network and brand value/reputation as second.