Best Values in Public Colleges
As states tighten their belts, tuitions bulge. What better time to check out top deals in higher education?
By Brian Knestout
November 2003
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Our exclusive survey of U.S. public colleges and universities shines a spotlight on schools that combine great academics with reasonable costs.
As our database shows, there are still dozens of places where students can get an excellent education for a reasonable price. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill tops our list for a fourth consecutive time, despite a 5% tuition increase this fall. How? Despite the hike, total costs for in-state ($11,290) and out-of-state ($23,138) students remain reasonable, especially when judged against private schools with similar academic reputations.
High-caliber academics and generous financial aid are also keys to UNC's top ranking. Chapel Hill's ability to meet 100% of the shortfall for students with financial need sets the school apart from the pack. "Need" is the difference between a college's cost and the amount formulas calculate a family can "afford" to pay. A school that meets 100% of need offers enough grant money, loans and work-study jobs to fill the gap.
Chapel Hill's sterling academics and reasonable cost let it draw top-notch students without having to rely on beefy merit-based scholarships, saving the money for those with need (the school does offer merit-based scholarships, but it primarily uses private donations to fund them).
Out-of-state deals
The nation's best deal for in-state students is, unfortunately, available only to North Carolina residents. So this year we applied our evaluation to out-of-state total costs to uncover the best bargains for out-of-state students, too.
Drumroll, please: Backed by its strong academic and financial aid scores, UNC-Chapel Hill comes out on top again. But some schools actually turn out to be better relative values for out-of-state students than for locals. Consider Truman State University, in Kirksville, Mo. It ranks ninth on the list of in-state bargains, but rises to second when ranked on the cost to students from outside the Show-Me state.
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Finding the right college is a highly individual decision that no list of "bests" can encompass. But our list of schools, ranging from small (sixth-ranked New College of Florida, with 650 students) to small planet (University of Texas at Austin, with nearly 40,000), and from big city (University of California, Los Angeles) to college town (University of Virginia, in Charlottesville), is a good place to begin you search (see Expand Your Search Online for the Best Values for ways to customize your quest).
How the cream rises
We determined our rankings based on data provided by more than 500 public, four-year colleges and universities to Peterson's, a division of the Thomson Corp. We supplemented Peterson's data with our own reporting.
We cut the list to the 200 schools with the highest percentages of the 2002-03 freshman class scoring above 600 on the verbal and math components of the SAT I, or scoring above 24 on the ACT.
We culled that list to arrive at the top 100 schools based on several other measures of academic quality -- including admission rates, student-faculty ratios, the percentage of faculty with the highest degrees in their field, how much each school spends on instruction for each student, how much each school spends on its library facilities, and four- and six-year graduation rates.
Finally, we ranked each school on a combination of quality and cost components. We looked at total cost for in-state students (tuition, mandatory fees, room, board and estimated expenses for books and supplies), the average cost for a student with need after subtracting grants (but not loans), the average cost for a student without need after subtracting merit-based grants, the average percentage of need met by aid, and average debt a student accumulates before graduation.
We repeated the procedure using out-of-state total costs and average costs after aid to determine out-of-state rankings. Overall, our scoring places greater weight on quality, which accounts for about two-thirds of the final score, than on cost.
One catch to these bargains is that you've got to gain admission. That's a tough hurdle at four of our top 20 schools (UC-Berkeley, William & Mary, Virginia and UNC-Chapel Hill), where 40% or fewer of applicants get in.
Total in-state costs among our top 100 range from $7,913 at Appalachian State University to $17,616 at UCLA. Out-of-state costs range from $13,316 at the Mississippi University for Women to $33,473 at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor.
That's not cheap, which is why we credit schools that are generous with their need-based aid. Besides Chapel Hill, other schools that meet more than 95% of need include Colorado School of Mines, Iowa State University of Science and Technology, Michigan State University and University of California, San Diego.
-Reporter: Alison Stevenson
