Macalester is one of the smartest colleges in the country, says new study

A new study gives Mac students high marks for their critical thinking skills.

If a new Lumosity study can be believed, Macalester students aren't just the smartest in the state -- they're some of the smartest in the country.

SEE ALSO: Macalester is LGBT friendly after all, says Campus Pride Index

Unsatisfied with college rankings that only consider "resources" -- for example, endowment per student, student-faculty ratio, and graduation rates -- Lumosity, a cognitive training site run by Lumos Labs, decided to take a look at students' cognitive skills. As Business Insider reports, researchers did so by testing "60,000 students at over 400 colleges and universities to play games that measured various cognitive skills including attention, memory, speed of processing, problem solving, and flexibility." And Mac students' performance was impressive enough to land the school on "The 20 Smartest Colleges In America" list.

Here's the full top 20 list:

1. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
2. Harvard University
3. Stanford University
4. Northwestern University
5. Yale University
6. Washington University in St Louis
7. Dartmouth College
8. Wellesley College
9. Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
10. Duke University
11. College of William and Mary
12. University of Pennsylvania
13. University of Portland
14. University of California-Berkeley
15. Vanderbilt University
16. University of Chicago
17. Carnegie Mellon University
18. Macalester College
19. Worcester Polytechnic Institute
20. University of California-Los Angeles

Macalester's recognition as one of the "Smartest Colleges" dovetails nicely with what one student said about the school a couple years ago when it made a "Nerdiest Campuses" list.
Mac "really is a model for a liberal arts institution, where intangible skills and thinking are emphasized more than jobs, unless you are an economics major," the student said.

Perhaps then it's no coincidence that the man who is arguably Mac's most-renown alum -- former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan -- graduated in 1961 with an economics degree.