Kiplinger: University education is affordable, high quality

Princeton rose one position from third place in last year’s rankings. The California Institute of Technology leads the list of private universities for the fourth consecutive year.

Third on the list is Yale, followed by Rice, Harvard and Duke. Columbia, Penn, Dartmouth and MIT complete the top 10 best-value private universities.

The top 100 private colleges on the Kiplinger list offer affordable, high-quality educations by providing generous financial aid to their students, according to the magazine’s website. Kiplinger’s rankings are based on academic quality and affordability, with academic quality accounting for two-thirds of the total score and affordability making up the remaining third. Affordability is measured by numerical values such as total cost, financial aid from grants and average debt at graduation.

“Princeton offers key components of ‘best value:’ terrific academics and generous financial aid,” Jane Bennett Clark, senior associate editor of Kiplinger, said in an e-mail to The Daily Princetonian. “Princeton has also been a leader in eliminating loans from financial-aid award packages,” she added. As a result, students graduate with an average debt of less than $6,000, the lowest amount among the private universities in Kiplinger’s rankings.

“Academic quality can be defined on various numeric measures, such as student-faculty ratio, test scores of incoming freshmen and graduation rates,” she added. “Numerical measures are used in order to rank the schools as objectively as possible.”

The US News & World Report also published a list of the best-value national universities in September. Princeton ranked third on this list, following Harvard and Yale, in first and second, respectively. These rankings were based on three variables, including ratio of quality to price, percentage of undergraduates receiving need-based scholarships and the percentage of total cost covered by need-based financial aid.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was ranked by Kiplinger as the best-value public university for in-state students, followed by the University of Florida, the University of Virginia, the University of Georgia and the College of William & Mary. For out-of-state students, SUNY Binghamton topped the best-value list of public universities, SUNY Geneseo ranked second, Chapel Hill was third, and the University of Florida and Truman State University rounded out the top five.

Kiplinger also publishes a list of the best-value liberal arts colleges. The magazine distinguishes between the private universities and liberal arts colleges because “liberal-arts colleges concentrate on undergraduates, and universities extend their mission to graduate students,” Clark said in a statement announcing the rankings.

Pomona College leads the liberal arts colleges, followed by Swarthmore, Williams, Davidson, Claremont McKenna, Amherst, Washington and Lee, College of the Holy Cross, Colby and Bowdoin. Pomona leads the liberal arts rankings for the second year in a row.