The University of Texas Tower on the University of Texas campus on September 19, 2009 in Austin, Texas.

Although there are no official Ivy League schools in Texas, Forbes is ranking two universities in the Lone Star State as a similar caliber. While there may be no Ivy League of the South, this is the next best thing.

Forbes reported last week that recent events on campus have made Ivies almost unrecognizable. From the loss of affirmative action to college president resignations and university's responses to on-campus protests against the war in Gaza , Forbes is saying, "if the Ivies aren’t the Ivies anymore, which schools exactly are?"

After disqualifying the original eight member institutions — Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Columbia, Dartmouth, Cornell and Penn — alongside other highly prestigious "Ivy-plus" schools like Stanford, Duke, MIT and University of Chicago, Forbes compiled a list of Ivy equivalents in different states. The business publication starts with 1,743 colleges and narrows it down to 20 public and private Ivy replacements.

Forbes used several data points to curate the list like standardized test scores and surveys of hiring managers to determine the top 10 public and 10 private institutions in the country that are "turning out smart, driven graduates craved by employers."

Rice University in Houston made Forbes' "New Private Ivies" list and the University of Texas at Austin made the top 10 list of "Public Ivies" instead of the legacies. Students from both UT Austin and Rice have been participating in pro-Palestinian protests that have erupted on college campuses nationwide, the first of which began with encampments at Columbia with student demonstrators demanding that their universities divest from business in Israel.

Forbes' "Public Ivies" listed 10 state universities across the U.S. that "attract high-achievers and turn out hard-working, highly-regarded employees." The 10 "Private Ivies" are located in nine states and Washington, D.C., which are reportedly "attracting the smartest students and plaudits from employers." Students from Forbes' New Ivies average a robust 1482 SAT and 33 ACT, relying heavily on objective measures of success.