These are the best colleges in America

The Wall Street Journal created a list, ranking the best colleges in America. Yahoo Finance’s On The Move panel share the details.

Video Transcript

- All right, let's talk about getting a good education. Wall Street Journal out with a new ranking which says the Ivy Leagues are at the top, you've got Harvard University number one, then you've got MIT, followed by Yale, Stanford, Brown, Duke, California, Princeton, Cornell, and Northwestern. Yesterday Joe Biden was saying who needs an Ivy League education to be president of the United States? Who wants to weigh in on this? Julie Hyman, what is the state of education right now?

JULIE HYMAN: The state of education isn't good. I think that's pretty clear, right, from what we have seen, not just on the higher education level but on the lower education level as well. And you know, this whole pandemic is definitely leading to a reckoning about the return on investment when it comes to higher education. I mean, this is something that Scott Galloway, frequent guest on the program, has talked a lot about.

And it's also interesting when you look not just at undergrad but at grad as well, Bloomberg Businessweek, which comes out with a highly watched MBA ranking every year, this year said we're not going to do the ranking. We're just going to ask people how they're doing right now, and there were a lot of questions about that return on investment that you're getting from MBA programs as well.

DAN ROBERTS: And guys, the question about the true ROI of both undergrad college and certainly also grad school, you know, that's been an issue for a few years now, and by the way, Scott Galloway was not the first to bring that up. I mean, Peter Teal was also the big anti-college flag waver in his ilk, now of course his politics aside. But I do think that the pandemic and what it has done to the college experience right now, I mean, look at you know, since last March.

Anyone who is a senior in college last year, or anyone who is entering college, or who's entering it now. I mean, I've seen my old school, Middlebury, where I went, has posted the videos of students arriving on campus, and they've got the masks and there's tape everywhere. And of course, these are necessary precautions. But it just doesn't look like the experience is even worth it. But of course, maybe it's better than doing classes from home.

Either way, it's hard for me to believe that this will just be seen as a temporary pandemic only kind of bucket of cold water on the college experience. I think that the timing couldn't have been worse, because it was already hitting at a time when college was being questioned, and I think you're going to see a lot more people in the next five to 10 years just do pre-professional school or even learn how to code. Better that than go be an English major at a liberal arts school like I was, right? And so it's going to be tough sledding for colleges, not to mention all the writing I've done about how having no college football for a lot of these schools has lost them billions of dollars collectively. It's been a real problem.

JULIE HYMAN: It turned out OK for you, Dan Roberts.

DAN ROBERTS: Eh.

- All right, I'm going to jump in here. I think we're at the beginning of a major shakeup in the university structure. Not going to affect the top echelon of schools like Harvard and Yale that we're talking about at the top of this segment, but the lower ones are facing massive budget shortfalls, and they've enjoyed kind of a free ride since the government started guaranteeing all student loans, because that allowed them, the universities to raise prices without the fear of students not being able to pay for them, just automatically get a loan. So I think this is the beginning of a major disruption for them.

- Well talk about disruption. You've got Elizabeth Warren, the senator, as well as Senator Chuck Schumer out of New York talking about forgiving up to $50,000 in student debt. I got to tell you, my four years at Syracuse University back in the last century in the 1980s did not total $50,000. That was four years, room, board, and tuition. So what do you think of this proposal?

JULIE HYMAN: Well, I would say what's interesting about this proposal, there are a couple of things that are interesting about it. First of all, this is a resolution that's asking whoever is next president to sign an executive order to this effect. So it's interesting that they're sort of saying that this is maybe a bipartisan non-political issue.

The other thing that's interesting, to your point, Adam, is that it's not as though someone like a Galloway is saying there's no value in higher education. It's just that it's overpriced, right? And that there has not been, until now, the kind of real pushback. I mean, we're seeing class action lawsuits on the part of students who say they want some tuition reimbursement, or at least tuition cuts if they are not going to be attending in-person classes.

So whether that will indeed change anything in terms of the economics of these higher ed in combination with this kind of resolution that these senators are calling for. I think that's still an open question, but the conversation is louder, certainly, than it's ever been.