forbes discovered georgetown
On the business model hiding inside business media, and why the publication telling you what to think about elite universities is selling crystal trophies to elite universities
My overconsumption of business media is an occupational hazard. I keep an antacid nearby, but Forbes’ annual New Ivies list published this month elicited a visceral reaction. The premise: identifying 20 colleges that employers supposedly love and that represent genuine alternatives to ‘The Ivy League.’ What follows is what I found, written for anyone who has ever made a consequential decision based on something they read in a business publication and only later wondered who was actually being served.
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The New Age of Discovery
Every April, with the seasonal reliability of pollen and tuition increases, Forbes publishes its ‘New Ivies’ list. This year, after an exhaustive survey of over 100 C-suite executives and a rigorous methodology that will be discussed shortly, Forbes has heroically discovered Georgetown.
Yes. Georgetown. Founded 1789. Alma mater of Bill Clinton, Supreme Court justices, innumerable U.S. Senators and congressmen, and roughly half the people in a Washington D.C. lobbyists’ watering hole at any given moment. Well, good news: Forbes has discovered Georgetown, and has named it a New Ivy.
They also found Northwestern, Vanderbilt, which accepts 6% of applicants, Carnegie Mellon, and Notre Dame, a school so embedded in American cultural life that Hollywood made a movie about its football team in 1993 and people still watch it voluntarily.
The rigorous methodology involved excluding the 8 schools that are part of the actual Ivy League athletic conference, plus five other schools summarily designated by Forbes as “Ivy-Plus”: Stanford, MIT, Duke, the University of Chicago, and Johns Hopkins. From ~3,500 institutions, 13 were removed, and the remaining schools in the very same bracket of selectivity, research output, national influence, and price tag have been named to the ‘New Ivies’ list. Hallelujah.
Forbes’ corresponding Public Ivies list deserves its own moment. The University of Michigan and the University of Virginia appear on the New Ivies list. These two schools are, in the formal academic literature, actually called Public Ivies. The term was coined in 1985 by Richard Moll in a book he named, with characteristic restraint, “The Public Ivies.” Forbes looked directly at the Public Ivies, and named them the ‘New Ivies: Public.’ Got it?
How To Find What You Already Know
To identify these previously invisible institutions, Forbes surveyed C-suite and hiring executives and asked them to rate schools they had direct experience with. The business executives who have spent 40 years sending their recruiters to Northwestern rated Northwestern highly. The executives who have been filling their analyst classes from UVA since the Reagan administration gave UVA strong marks. This is the methodological equivalent of asking BMW owners which cars they like to drive, and then publishing the answer under the headline “Underrated Car Brand to Watch: BMW.”
The survey instrument cannot find anything its respondents don’t already know. A school genuinely breaking into elite recruiting networks for the first time produces no signal in a survey of executives who haven’t hired from it yet. The methodology is a closed loop: it measures the existing consensus, confirms the existing consensus, and publishes the confirmed consensus as news.
The AI hook is where things get truly impressive. Each school profile contains one paragraph sourced from a phone call with a university administrator. A provost said something optimistic about the liberal arts. A director of employer relations noted that AI job titles are appearing more frequently in offers to graduates. An administrator at one school reported that students are asked to make AI models debate each other, which sounds either cutting-edge or like an undergraduate avoiding the assigned reading, depending on your disposition. Forbes gathered 20 quotes from the communications offices of 20 of the most communications-sophisticated universities in the country (minus the Ivy League and Stanford, of course), reported what those universities said about themselves, and presented the result as an independent assessment of which schools are preparing students for the AI economy. The schools told Forbes they were doing well. Forbes said “I’m sure you’re right!”
The Crystal Desktop Award
Once a school makes the Forbes New Ivies list, its marketing and communications team begins to receive ‘exclusive’ offers.
Forbes runs a program called Forbes Accolades. The entry tier allows the institution to license the official Forbes badge for its website, press releases, email signatures, and newsletters. The next tier adds paid social media, printed brochures, trade show signage, and direct mail. The top tier covers billboards, broadcast advertising, search engine marketing, and something called a Listmaker Voice article, which appears on Forbes.com in the visual language of editorial content and the legal category of a paid placement. Physical plaques, framed reprints, and crystal desktop awards are available through a third-party fulfillment partner. Pricing is not listed. If you have to ask, perhaps you don’t belong on the New Ivies list.
Northwestern’s endowment is $15 billion. Vanderbilt’s is $11 billion. These institutions have enrollment marketing operations that dwarf the entire editorial budgets of most publications covering higher education, even the vast resources available to us here at The Intelligence Council. They have communications and admissions campaigns running across every channel the Platinum tier covers. Forbes named exactly these schools and is now selling them the badges and tchotchkes to prove it.
The list is not the product. The list is the reason the product exists. And the 20 schools on it were never going to be the 20 schools that couldn’t afford the tchotchkes.
Forbes’ New Ivies list is not an outlier, just another template in the business media industry where the incentives are fundamentally misaligned with what’s best for readers. This particular template: build a ranked editorial franchise, generate anxiety in the entities that didn’t make it, generate vanity in the ones that did—ok, fine. But here is the misalignment: the monetization layer is to sell badges and content licenses to the winners, and guess what? The winners happen to be the very institutions that can afford the shiny objects. And they call this circus business journalism. This model runs across business media in verticals you read every day. The New Ivies list was just unusually easy to see through.
The useful habit isn’t cynicism. It’s one question, asked before you trust anything you read: how does this publication make money, and from whom?
Adil Husain is the founder of The Intelligence Council and Managing Director of Emerging Strategy, a global advisory firm specializing in competitive strategy and international growth. He has spent over 15 years advising companies operating at the intersection of education and technology, and writes about strategy, global markets, and institutional behavior.
You can reach Adil at adil@intelligencecouncil.com