Dartmouth College

• In its calculation of salary rankings by alma mater, "Forbes" magazine ranked Dartmouth College #1 for highest median annual earnings among graduates. This is a measurement of all Dartmouth College graduates' salaries, regardless of major or whether they are recent graduates or seasoned professionals who graduated decades ago. While earnings for specific programs in other universities may outperform those at Dartmouth, the college is at the top of the list for its $134,000 median graduate salary. Dartmouth, founded in 1769 in Hanover, New Hampshire, has more than 5,000 students.
  
  

Yale University

• Although graduates from Dartmouth College have the highest median salary on the whole, Dartmouth's Ivy League competitor Yale University shows that its graduates have the highest median salaries after 10 to 20 years of experience. Forbes Magazine reports that the top 10 percent of Yale graduates' salaries are $326,000 or above, while Dartmouth's top 10 percent are $321,000 or above. Yale was founded in 1701 in New Haven, Connecticut, and has more than 11,000 students.
  
  

Petroleum Engineering Universities

• For the sake of being able to pay for student loans and other issues, some prospective university students look more at what they will be making four years from now than at what they will be making 40 years from now. According to Payscale.com, the most lucrative bachelor's degree for recent graduates is petroleum engineering. The median earnings for petroleum engineers just out of college is $93,000 per year. According to Infozee.com, the three highest-ranked petroleum engineering programs in the United States are the ones offered at Texas A&M University, the University of Texas and Stanford University. Texas A&M is in College Station, Texas, while the University of Texas is in Austin, Texas and Stanford University is in Palo Alto, California.
  
  

Best Value Universities

• According to The Princeton Review, even though Ivy League schools like Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth and Princeton charge some of the highest tuition fees, the higher median income levels for their graduates tend to make up for that fact. However, The Princeton Review also lists a number of other less-famous colleges as having a high value of education relative to what you pay. The highest-ranked public university on the list is the University of Virginia, while the highest-ranked private university on the list is Swarthmore College.