A Degree Of Value - best values in college tuition - Statistical Data Included

Kiplinger's Personal Finance Magazine, Oct, 2000 by Kristin Davis, Elaine Woo, Sean O'Neill

Those schools, which attract strong students because of the high demand, qualified for tougher scrutiny. To narrow the list to the final 100, we looked at a variety of additional quality measures, including graduation rates, how many freshmen return for their sophomore year, student-faculty ratios, how much the college spends per student on instruction, and how much it spends to maintain library resources.

After the top 100 were selected on quality alone, they were ranked on a combination of quality and cost measures: total cost, percentage of financial need met for the average student with need, average cost for students with need after subtracting grants (but not loans), and average amount of debt a student accumulates before graduation. Overall, the formula placed greater weight on quality (71%) than on cost (29%) because "value" is not synonymous with "cheap."

For consistency, we used 1999-2000 cost figures for all schools in our analysis. We have since updated tuition and room and board to 2000-01 costs in the tables, so you can see what students are paying this fall. We broke ties in the rankings by giving the edge to colleges that charge out-of-state students less.

Details, details

TO TAKE ADVANTAGE of a great value, you first have to get in, and that's a challenge at some of our top ten. At Chapel Hill, U.Va. and Berkeley, for instance, fewer than 40% of applicants get good news. But most of our best values are within reach for good students: At three-fourths of the top 100 (and four in the top ten), the admission rate exceeds 60%.

When is graduation? If there's one area in which public colleges tend to lag private schools, it's in their ability to graduate students quickly. A fifth or even sixth year of college is not uncommon for public-college students, and an extra year or two of expenses will take the luster off a good value. For that reason, we gave strong consideration to four-year graduation rates in addition to six-year rates, which are a more popular statistic. On our list, U.Va. and William and Mary stand out for their high four-year graduation rates. The average among schools on our list is just 33% (compared with an average six-year graduation rate of 63%), which means that roughly half of those who graduate from one of our top-100 schools take longer than four years to do so.

How much out of pocket? Total costs at the schools in our top 100 range from a mere $5,668 to about $15,000 for state residents. The tab for out-of-state students runs from $10,266 (at the University of Mississippi, 42) to almost $26,000 (at the University of Michigan). Because costs are already low, most middle-income families qualify for little or no financial aid except loans. Thus, we gave the greatest weight in our formulas to raw costs.

But we did give extra credit to schools that are generous with need-based financial aid. Unlike most private schools, many publics do not meet a student's full financial need, so we considered the percentage of need each school does meet (about 80% is average). We also measured how much aid is in the form of grants rather than loans, and how much debt a typical student accrues. Colleges that stand out for generous aid include Chapel Hill, SUNY Binghamton (5) and the University of Washington (13).