Stanford University is the highest-ranked school in the West for student outcomes in the Wall Street Journal/Times Higher Education College Rankings.

Stanford is one of four Western schools that rank in the top 20 nationwide for student outcomes, along with the California Institute of Technology, the University of California, Los Angeles and the University of California, Berkeley.

The WSJ/THE rankings emphasize how well a college will prepare students for life after graduation. The overall ranking is based on 15 factors across four main categories: Forty percent of each school’s overall score comes from student outcomes, including measures of graduate salaries and debt burdens, 30% from the school’s academic resources, 20% from how well it engages its students and 10% from its diversity.

Six of the top 10 colleges in the West for student outcomes are public schools, including five from the University of California system. Only one of the 10 isn’t located in California—the University of Washington-Seattle.

Overall national ranks for these 10 schools range from Caltech’s No. 5 to the University of California, Santa Barbara’s No. 71.

