Washington Monthly - September/October 2015 - 27
AMERICA'S BEST
BANG FOR THE
BUCK COLLEGES 2015
Our exclusive list of schools that help non-wealthy
students attain marketable degrees at affordable prices.
By Robert Kelchen
T
his is the fourth year in a row we've produced a set of
rankings that rewards colleges that do a good job of conferring degrees on lower- and middle-income students
while charging them reasonable prices. This "Best Bang for the
Buck" measure has evolved over time, from an article highlighting a small number of colleges with great outcomes in the first
year to a stand-alone list of several hundred colleges performing
well on access, affordability, and completion metrics.
The national discussion about college value has also
changed. Two years ago, President Barack Obama was vowing to
rate the nation's colleges and universities based on metrics very
similar to our Best Bang for the Buck rankings. Earlier this summer, however, the administration raised the white flag after bitter protests from the college lobbying community and threats
from Congress to defund the endeavor. It now says it will merely provide more and better data and let private outfits do the
grading. This means that if you want to know which colleges in
America provide the best value for ordinary, non-wealthy students, the Washington Monthly is the only game in town!
We'll incorporate the government's new data, if it's valuable, into future rankings. But we're not standing still this year.
For a new book we just published, The Other College Guide: A
Roadmap to the Right School for You (New Press), we've revised our
Best Bang for the Buck rankings to include all four-year colleges covered in our regular rankings, not just the few hundred top
ones. To do so, we changed our methodology slightly (a detailed
methodology can be found at washingtonmonthly.com). Instead
of creating a short list of schools that met our minimum performance standards (on student loan default rate, graduation rate,
graduation rate performance, and the percentage of students receiving Pell Grants) and then ranking those schools by their net
price of attendance (how much students pay for college after
grants and scholarships), we ranked all colleges by those performance criteria and then considered net price. We've also grouped
colleges by region to make the rankings easier for students to
use-80 percent of students choose colleges near where they
live. You can see the top fifty colleges and universities from each
region beginning on page 28 and the rest (including the schools
that don't rank so well) on our website, washingtonmonthly.com.
T
he first thing you'll notice is that the top-ranked
colleges within each region (College of the Ozarks, the
City University of New York's Bernard Baruch College, Berea College in Kentucky, East Carolina University in
North Carolina, and the University of Washington's main Seattle campus) are a mix of household names and relatively unknown institutions. But the stories behind these colleges and
their strong performances are fascinating. For example, Berea
College primarily serves students from low-income families
and does not charge tuition, thanks to a large endowment
and generous donors, resulting in a negative net price for the
neediest students and a 64 percent graduation rate. East Carolina University, however, relies on the state of North Carolina's traditional strong support for higher education in order
to keep tuition low. At East Carolina, nearly 60 percent of students graduate, 31 percent receive Pell Grants, and just 3 percent default on their loans. Berea and East Carolina are not
found in the top fifty of the U.S. News rankings, but they are a
great value for students who can gain admission.
While all of the colleges near the top of the list do a good
job of serving a broad swath of the population at a reasonable
price, this is not necessarily the case for colleges near the bottom
of the list. Many University of Phoenix branch campuses show
up near the bottom of the lists, and for good reason. Graduation
rates are typically below 25 percent, one in six students default
on their loans within two years of beginning repayment, and the
net price per year is around $23,000. Although much of the forprofit college sector has faced scrutiny for poor outcomes and
high prices, students should also be wary of some of the public
and private nonprofit colleges with similarly poor outcomes.
Robert Kelchen (@rkelchen) is an assistant professor of higher education in the Department of Education Leadership, Management and
Policy at Seton Hall University.
Washington Monthly
27
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Washington Monthly - September/October 2015
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