“Prestigious” colleges include the Ivy League — Harvard, Yale, Brown, Dartmouth, Princeton, Columbia, Cornell, and the University of Pennsylvania. Other universities in this grouping would probably include Duke, University of California at Berkeley, University of Michigan, NYU, Johns Hopkins, and Georgetown. (And a lot more!)

There are also hundreds of smaller colleges — Amherst, Hofstra, Bryn Mawr, Villanova, Emory, Vanderbilt — where you would get an excellent education. Or larger colleges, mostly run by the states — SUNY (State Univ. of New York, Penn State, UMass, Rutgers, UCLA (California, Los Angeles), Wisconsin, Tennessee, Texas…

The main thing you want to look for is accreditation to make sure that the degree is going to be worth something when you’re done, but there are literally thousands of institutions that grant degrees in the United States. You’ll get a good education at most of them, so it’s just a matter of finding an atmosphere that suits you.

Harvard University

Yale University

Columbia University

Dartmouth College

Brown University

University of Pennsylvania

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Stamford University

Cornell University