America's top colleges 2015

By CAROLINE HOWARD

The No. 1 FORBES Top College 2015 is Pomona College, followed by Williams College and Stanford University. The highest ranking public school is the University of California, Berkeley.

The nation's 18 million undergrad students heading off for school year 2015-6 will pay an estimated total $23,410 on college costs ($46,272 for private schools). An average newly minted grad with student loan debt will have to pay back some $35,000; overall national student debt has escalated to an all-time high of $1.2 trillion.

While the cost of U.S. higher education escalates, there's a genuine silver lining in play. It turns out that a growing number of colleges and universities are focusing on consumer value over marketing prestige, making this a new age of return-on-investment education. This pivot is the result of intense public scrutiny on cost vs. long tail worth -- the very heart of FORBES definitive Top Colleges ranking, now in its eighth year.

This year's No. 1 FORBES Top College is Pomona College, followed by Williams College and Stanford University. The first Ivy League school to show, Princeton University, comes in at No. 4, followed by Yale University (No. 5), Harvard University (No. 6) and Brown University (No. 8). Rounding out the 10 finest schools in America are Swarthmore College (No. 7), Amherst College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Click through the gallery to learn more about the top 10 colleges on the list:

The three highest ranking public schools are University of California, Berkeley (No. 35), University of Virginia (No. 36), and the College of William & Mary (No. 39). The U.S. Service Academies earn highest medals as some of the nation's leading higher education institutions: the U.S. Military Academy at West Point comes in at No. 11, followed by U.S. Naval Academy (No. 27) and U.S. Air Force Academy (No. 38).

The number of large, brainy, research-oriented universities closely associated with science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) have a slight edge at the peak of the rankings over small, student-centric, liberal arts colleges, although the Gold and Silver medals go to the latter. Wellesley College (No. 26) was ranked the best all-women's college.

More from Forbes:
America's 25 top colleges
Best value colleges
Best public universities