If you’re a student-athlete who wants to be recruited to compete at the college level, one of the first things you should do in your recruiting process is assemble a target list of schools you’re interested in. While it’s different for everyone, you should look for schools where you’ll fit in athletically and academically. When assembling your list, you should also consider what you’re looking for in campus life, the college town culture, winning tradition, opportunities to play, other scholarship opportunities, and more.

While assembling a target list of 10 or 15 colleges sounds easy, it can actually be quite daunting with thousands of colleges to consider. So, to help provide a starting point, check out this list of the 50 best colleges for student-athletes.

Compiled by the college ranking service NIche, this list was assembled based on academic and athletic data and surveys of more than 75,000 students. The academic data considered included:

• Each school’s acceptance rate.
• SAT/ACT scores.
• Quality of professors.
• Graduation rate.
• Money spent on research.

Athletically, the Niche rankings factored in student opinion, NCAA championships across all sports, total athletic event attendance at each school, athletic department revenues, and the percentage of students participating in varsity level athletics. Add it all up, and the best colleges for athletes are listed below

The Best College For Athletes

1. Stanford University
2. Duke University
3. University of Southern California
4. University of Florida
5. University of Notre Dame
6. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
7. University of Virginia
8. University of Michigan – Ann Arbor
9. Vanderbilt University
10. University of Miami
11. Northwestern University
12. University of Texas – Austin
13. Yale University
14. University of California – Los Angeles
15. Florida State University
16. Harvard University
17. Villanova University
18. Princeton University
19. Rice University
20. The Ohio State University
21. University of Maryland – College Park
22. Clemson University
23. Dartmouth College
24. University of California – Berkeley
25. Baylor University
26. Boston College
27. Wake Forest University
28. Washington University in St. Louis
29. Georgetown University
30. University of Georgia
31. University of Connecticut
32. Brown University
33. University of Wisconsin
34. Penn State
35. The University of Alabama
36. Michigan State University
37. Columbia University
38. Amherst College
39. University of Oklahoma
40. University of Pennsylvania
41. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
42. Louisiana State University
43. Georgia Institute of Technology
44. Texas A&M University
45. Cornell University
46. Williams College
47. University of Richmond
48. Syracuse University
49. Middlebury College
50. University of Washington

Want to see even more of the best colleges for athletes, as well as overall ratings, grades, SAT averages, and costs for just about every school in the country? Check out the complete list here.