State universities to cheer about

Kiplinger's Personal Finance Magazine, Sept, 1998 by Kristin Davis

A high-caliber college education can be affordable, too. The top 100 public universities in our rankings are great values.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was not a compromise choice for sophomore Jason Russell. With a 1510 combined SAT score and a 5.0 grade-point average (weighted tot advanced-placement classes), the Greensboro, N.C., native could have gotten into practically any school in the country. Besides UNC, he was accepted at Davidson, Duke and Wake Forest, with enough scholarship offers or enriched financial-aid packages to make money a minor consideration. "It came down to which one I liked most," says Russell.

There's a lot to like about UNC Chapel Hill, the number-one school in our rankings. A beautiful campus and Tar Heel basketball are big attractions, Russell says. But it's also a place where high achievers are in good company. The middle group of entering freshmen scored between 1130 and 1330 on the SATs, which means that the top one-fourth of students, like Russell, did even better. Student satisfaction is high: 94% of freshmen return for their sophomore year, and 84% go on to earn their degrees at Chapel Hill. The icing: In-state students pay just over $2,200 in tuition and fees; with room and board, the total annual cost is less than $7,200. Even out-of state students can get a top-quality education for $16,170, or roughly half the cost of the nation's most expensive private colleges.

In fact, for every student at a top-dollar university--where expenses run $33,000 a year--there are ten who attend four-year schools where annual expenses, without factoring in financial aid, still don't exceed $10,000. And they're not sacrificing the quality of their education for the sake of saving money, either.

Most of those schools are the public colleges and universities supported by your tax dollars. In typical surveys of U.S. colleges, public tour-year institutions are scattered throughout the rankings of 1,800-plus schools. But we've turned the spotlight on the 600 or so public four-year colleges and universities in the U.S., in search of best buys--schools where students can graduate with a high-caliber education but without a mortgage-size debt.

Our ranking of 100 schools, which starts on page 80, includes some of the best-known names in the U.S. But we also turned up some surprises--gems that shine when you consider cost and financial-aid access as well as quality of education.

Take the College of New Jersey, in Ewing (near Princeton), number 14 in our rankings. This small liberal arts college, with 5,400 students, stands out because admissions are competitive (57% of applicants are accepted) and freshmen like what they see--94% return for their sophomore year. An emphasis on undergraduate teaching keeps classes small, and none is taught by a graduate assistant. TCNJ is one of the very best values in our rankings for out-of-state students, with total costs at $13,668, just $2,830 more than New Jersey residents pay.

It's such combinations of quality and affordability that send the College of New Jersey and the other schools in our rankings to the head of the class.

HOW WE CHOSE BEST VALUES

The bulk of our data comes from Wintergreen/Orchard House, which collects statistics each year from 1,813 North American colleges and universities, including 588 four-year public institutions. We eliminated non-U.S. schools and specialty schools, such as colleges that award degrees strictly in health sciences or fine arts, and we supplemented Wintergreen's data with information from our own survey of public colleges, conducted last winter and spring.

Then we pruned the list to 200 schools that merited closer attention, chosen primarily on the basis of one quality measure, selectivity, as evidenced by the SAT scores of the 1997 freshman class and the percentage of applicants who were granted admission. It's the schools that are most in demand by strong students, and therefore most able to pick and choose, that tend to offer the best quality overall.

To the list of 200 finalists we applied a formula that ranked schools on quality only, taking into account graduation rates, the percentage of freshmen who return for sophomore year, SAT scores and admission rates, and computer and library resources. Finally, we sorted the top 100 survivors based on the quality measures plus five financial factors: total cost, cost as a percentage of a state's per-capita income (which measures affordability for residents), the percentage of a student's financial need the school meets with all forms of financial aid, the percentage of that aid that is self-help (loans or work-study versus grants) and the average amount a student must borrow to graduate.

To ensure consistency in scoring, we used 1997-98 costs for all schools, but replaced them with 1998-99 costs, where available, in the table on page 80. We reluctantly dropped one measure of quality--the average size of freshman lecture classes--from our formula because data was unreliable. But because many students worry they'll be "just a number" at a big state school, we've given small schools a slight edge in the rankings--an extra point (worth about 1.5% of the total score) to schools with fewer than 5,000 undergraduates and an extra half-point to those with fewer than 10,000. We haven't taken faculty into account (student-faculty ratios are also problematic), but the adjustment recognizes that students tend to receive more personal attention at a small school.