Pomona College in Los Angeles County has again ranked among the top 10 on Forbes' list of the best schools in the United States.

Pomona last year ranked 2nd among the 650 schools on the business magazine's annual ranking of U.S. colleges. This year it dropped lower but still held on to the 8th position.

Williams College in Massachusetts won top honors. Stanford University, another California school, dropped to 2nd place from its ranking as the top university last year.

Forbes says its ranking is different from many others in that its methodology focuses on what students get out of a school rather than on who's getting into it. The report relies on 12 metrics, with more than half the score coming from factors that can be categorized under "student satisfaction" and "post-graduate success." Other factors include the graduation rate and the number of students who go on to win a prestigious fellowship or earn a Ph.D.

Last year, Pomona beat out Ivy league heavyweights Harvard and Yale. 

Pomona College President David Oxtoby told KPCC then that the honor was well-deserved:

"Everyone is delighted that we are being discovered; we’re very proud of the quality of this place, and it’s nice others are recognizing it," he said.

The annual ranking is the result of a partnership between Forbes and the Washington, D.C.-based Center for College Affordability and Productivity (CCAP). It's the seventh year Forbes has published it.

Forbes' top 10 colleges

Rank	Name	State
1	Williams College	Massachusetts
2	Stanford University	California
3	Swarthmore College	Pennsylvania
4	Princeton University	New Jersey
5	Massachusetts Institute of Technology	Massachusetts
6	Yale University	Connecticut
7	Harvard University	Massachusetts
8	Pomona College	California
9	United States Military Academy	New York
10	Amherst College	Massachusetts

For more detailed information on the college rankings, check out Forbes' full list here.