A new study compiled by PayScale.com has ranked top 20 US colleges on the basis of the income of their alumni. Graduates of Dartmouth College topped the list with a median compensation of $134,000 while those of Princeton College came a close second with a median salary of $131,000.

The list ranked colleges based on the pay of graduates with ten to twenty years of work experience. Top performers of the 2008 graduating class at Dartmouth were bagged by frontline companies like McKinsey, Goldman Sachs and Bain as well as by non-profit organizations like Teach for America and the Peace Corps. The study included only those colleges with at least 1000 people enrolled. The only public college to feature in the top 20 list was University of California at Berkeley.

Even though Dartmouth’s graduates do best with 10 to 20 years of work experience, the highest paid 10 percent of Yale University alumni far exceed the top performers of Dartmouth in their total earnings. Again if less than five years of work experience are counted, then Dartmouth College comes after 18 colleges with a median pay of $58,000. The two best in this measure are Massachusetts Institute of Technology where recent graduates get a median compensation of $72,200 and Stanford University whose graduates earn $70,400.