“In my view any ranking system that puts UC Riverside ahead of Duke is suspect.”
@sherpa…UC Riverside much more affordable than Duke which is PRIVATE (as ubcalumnus points out above), most programs US News Ranked Top 100…moving up fast, getting tougher each and every year, and is the fastest growing UC campus of ANY UC location for a reason from this UC Riverside Highlander alumnus for life!! University of California System is the best PUBLIC in the nation and world where you will receive a top notch, affordable education at ANY UC!!
@ucbalumnus@Fisherman99 - Yes, UCR is more affordable for some, but for others, such as our family, Duke with need based aid was cheaper than a UC (OOS).
On the other hand, any survey that ranks Princeton #1 can’t be all bad.
Even outside the very top tier, not all publics are the same and not all public programs are the same. To give as examples, pretty much no one will confuse UA-Huntsville or UT-Dallas with UMich or UCLA.
But in some fields, they are pretty highly ranked and their students have plenty of opportunities.
There are also public honors programs who’s alums win prestigious fellowships and enter grad programs comparable to the top elites.
If one really believes Ramapo College is a “better value” than Carnegie Mellon, Harvey Mudd, Lehigh, et al, perhaps I can interest him/her in this very nice slightly used bridge in Brooklyn I have for sale.
Laughing at this. I read Forbes’ silly “ranking”. In New Jersey for example, Stevens comes out at the top of earnings of the graduates both in starting and mid-career salaries (which are heavily weighted by Forbes, a publication that glorifies the worship of wealth and money), yet, they think pedestrian institutions such as Ramapo College and College of New Jersey are “better values”.
If I have a stack of resumes on my desk from graduates of C-Mellon, HM, Lehigh, Stevens, Northeastern, etc., and ones from Ramapo and CNJ, whom do you think will be first on my list to interview? LOL.
Do any rankings assess total debt accrued for attendance? “Student debt” is misleading metric bc for the most part, students are limited to federal student loan limits. How about parental debt from remortgaging the family home, removing $$ from retirement accts, parent plus loans, etc? The underlying assumption in “student debt” at the generous meet need schools is that parents can meet their expected familial contribution.
@cupcakemuffins I’ll take my kids’ post-UG outcomes from their free rides at state schools any day.
If the major criteria for this type of ranking are earnings potential and monetary reward by virtue of having attended a specific school which Forbes heavily weights in its determination of “value”, Bloomberg Business Week/Payscale’s survey “What’s Your College Degree Worth, 2018” quantitatively ranks schools by starting salary, mid-career salary, and return on investment of tuition. Since ROI takes into account both earnings and cost/debt, it is an objective measure of the (monetary) value of the school’s “product”. The majority of the institutions in the top 50 of that survey (of 1,130 colleges and universities in the United States) are private. Despite having higher tuition, and presumably, higher levels of student debt as compared to public or state schools they still provide the highest ROI. When I was in high school I turned down an (almost) free ride at Rutgers to attend Stevens for which I had to pay off student loans, and I do not regret that.
That said, there is more to a college education than money of course. Publications such as Forbes, Payscale, etc., though as I said before are all about money so if that’s the basis of comparison this Forbes survey is flawed.
However, Stevens’ costs were much lower back when you attended, so that it was possible for a larger percentage of students and families to afford the cost of Stevens back then. Now, a much larger percentage of students and families cannot afford the up-front cost* due to having neither the money nor borrowing capacity (or would need to borrow amounts too risky to make sense), so that they do not have much of a choice but to choose a lower up-front cost.
*Stevens’ list price is about $67k. Its NPC suggests that a student with 4.0/1600 from a middle income family earning $60k would see a net price of $30k, which is a rather big stretch for such a family.
“Bloomberg Business Week/Payscale’s survey “What’s Your College Degree Worth, 2018” quantitatively ranks schools by starting salary, mid-career salary, and return on investment of tuition. Since ROI takes into account both earnings and cost/debt, it is an objective measure of the (monetary) value of the school’s “product”. The majority of the institutions in the top 50 of that survey (of 1,130 colleges and universities in the United States) are private.”
As with all rankings you have to really dig deeper into what they’re measuring and valuing. First off private colleges are a plurality (with 21), not a majority, as military/maritime colleges are 15 and public colleges are 14. Second, the private colleges are mainly science and technology focused, to the point where the 16’th ranked one, Webb, only offers one major! It is good though to see schools that many folks on cc think are underrated - Missouri S&T, NJIT etc. on the list.
@ucbalumnus - Of course Stevens was less expensive when I attended than it is now. All colleges - and everything else for that matter - were as well. A new Chevrolet cost $3,000. A 3 bedroom house cost $25,000. Gas was 30 cents a gallon. A loaf of bread was 50 cents. I remember my mother may she RIP complaining that Shop Rite raised the price of 4 sticks of butter to 81 cents (it’s almost $5 now). Life was wonderful. Ah, the good old days!
That’s a moot point, really. My parents at the time had an income of $17k a year and the tuition at Stevens was $3200 a year, not inclusive of room and board (the total COA was around $5700). That was still a large percentage of the average family income at that time, so the burden was certainly comparable. I had to take out student loans which I paid off for 7 years after graduating. Today, while it is of course better to graduate with as little debt as possible, a $30k loan balance with the prospect of being among the tenth highest earning college graduate cohort in America is a pretty low risk investment. The $30k loan in constant (i.e., inflation adjusted) dollars is comparable to the $7k in loans I had when I graduated, so the real cost is comparable to what it was at that time.
@theloniusmonk - Webb is a great school and not just for those wanting to become ship designers and naval architects despite that being their only formal major. Stevens by the way has one of the top 5 ocean engineering/naval architecture programs in the US. A third of Webb’s faculty are master’s and/or doctoral graduates from Stevens. The former head of the US Naval Academy’s Ocean Engineering department and now their Dean of Academic Affairs is a Stevens PhD (in fact, she is also the first female academic department head in the history of USNA - and - curiously enough - is also a graduate of Webb).
NJIT by the way, and all the other New Jersey public colleges, is not particularly cheap by the standards of public institutions in America. New Jersey has the most expensive public higher education system in America. The in-state tuition at NJIT and Rutgers for example is comparable to the out of state tuition at other states’ public universities. New Jersey has a large exodus of residents who leave the state to go to college because of this and other factors (one being the general perception of New Jersey public universities as being run of the mill). Stevens, Princeton, and a few divisions of Rutgers are the only New Jersey institutions New Jersey residents are clamoring to attend. Here in NJ by the way, NJIT and Rutgers are widely regarded as safeties for those who cannot get into the other surrounding area schools such as Stevens, Princeton, U of Delaware, Cooper Union, etc.
There’s an old saying in business, “People know the price of everything and the value of nothing”.
https://www.stevens.edu/admissions/tuition-financial-aid/tuition-fees-costs indicates that Stevens’ tuition today is $52,394, with a total cost of attendance of $69,888. So while Stevens’ cost at list price was about 30% of your parents’ income, Stevens’ cost today is about 116% of a middle income ($60,000), and the net price after financial aid and scholarships estimated by Stevens’ net price calculator (assuming optimistically 4.0/1600) is about 50% of a middle income.
Stevens’ graduates are 71% engineering and CS, so that result is not surprising since engineering and CS graduates from a wide range of schools do similarly well.
It is likely that a student and middle income family today would need a lot more than $30,000 in loans to pay for four years of Stevens.
It is often a luxury of the upper income people not to have to consider the up-front price of something. If you just cannot afford the up-front price of something, the value of it relative to the price is irrelevant because it is out of reach.
@Engineer80 Per your description, $5700 COA out $17,000 income is ~33% vs 50% income in @ucbalumnus’s post.
For that student of today to graduate with only $30,000 in loans, that family has to have $90,000 ( $22500/yr, almost 40% of their annual income) to contribute to college costs.
The student can’t take out the $30,000 in loans every yr. The parents have to either have the funds or take out the loans themselves.
Eta: I see I was typing while @ucbalumnus was responding.
@ucbalumnus - Payscale also had a separate survey in its “What’s Your College Degree Worth” publication of salary and ROI for engineering-only schools and graduates. In that survey, Stevens comes out at fifth out of 72 institutions in the US whose graduates were surveyed. Since engineering is a high starting salary field overall as you point out, the fact that Stevens graduates come out near the top of that group indicates that engineering employers put a higher value on them than those of many other institutions. The average loan amount of Stevens graduates is actually $26,400 according to Payscale, so clearly, they aren’t taking out $30k in loans every year.
I’m not minimizing the fact that $26k is a lot of money for a newly minted graduate to have to pay back at the inception of his or her working life. The sacrifice a parent must make in contributing to his/her child’s college education is also not insignificant. I remember the sacrifices my parents made when I was in school. Ideally, one would graduate with zero debt all other things being equal. It is unfortunate that in the United States higher education isn’t a priority as it is in Europe and other nations in which the universities have little out of pocket cost. Be that as it may however Stevens is still a great value proposition considering the return.
Incidentally, Stevens is 12th on Payscale’s survey, which is ahead of UCB at 26th (not that 26th is a terrible statistic). Their graduates graduate with an average loan debt of $23,400 (and that is in-state - presumably out of state is higher) which is comparable to those of Stevens.
$7K of loans was 130% of one year’s COA (i.e. about 1/3 of the total 4 year full pay cost). So the equivalent in loans today would be $90K. Not something that most would want to inflict on their kids. Or that could be paid off easily in 7 years.
This demonstrates a lack in understanding in how student debt is calculated. It is student debt which is generally represented by federal student loans which max out at $5500 freshman yr, $6500 soph, and $7500 jr and sr for the unsurprising number of $27,000, approx the avg debt listed for both schools. It is not familial debt which is the actual representation of how much debt the family accrues.
@Mom2aphysicsgeek - Then all the other schools on Payscale’s list are all “miscalculated” in the same way. If those numbers underestimate the actual debt for any one school they do the same for all of them.
Major Stevens Berkeley
Biomedical Eng 67200 76126
Chemical Eng 69150 68818
Civil Eng 62000 80071
Computer Eng 75600<br>
Electrical Eng 68300
El Eng Comp Sci 109078
Eng Science 79941
Eng Mgmt 65800<br>
Industrial Eng 78000
Mat Sci Eng 77317
Mechanical Eng 66700 74364
Business & Tech 62600<br>
Finance 73800
Business 77028
Computer Sci 78200 107433
Regarding the student loan debt levels, note that 28% of Berkeley undergraduates are on Pell grants, compared to only 16% of those at Stevens. Meaning Stevens has fewer students from lower to middle income families, but its students take on more debt.
However, average debt levels are less relevant for an individual student than the actual financial aid. Stevens’ net price calculator suggests that most students from lower to middle income families will have difficulty affording it.
@ucbalumnus - If the six figure averages for EE/CS and CS are true (I don’t believe them - how many graduates responded to the surveys and is this a statistically valid sample), it is only because many of those graduates settle in the very high cost SF/Silicon Valley/LA/etc. area. Many of those locales are even more expensive than the NY/NJ metro area. I was out in the SF area a few weeks ago on business and was talking to some of the engineers from the company we were visiting. Several of them said that an average studio apartment SF and in the suburbs of SF where we were rents for $4500 a month, and a three bedroom house there averages $1.1 million. With that type of cost of living, and being that the area is a center of the computer and electronics industries, it’s not suprising that the average salaries in those fields are higher there. In my area in northern NJ for example a studio/1 BR apartment can be had for $1600 a month and a 3 BR house for $450k (which is expensive as it is, but not like California). I once refused a job there because of the cost of living.
A 10% or so difference in Pell grant recipients is not that significant. UCB still doesn’t exactly have a plurality of low income students. The Pell grant population there is still less than a third.
If you want to make cost of living arguments, then how about a comparison with University of Alabama, where the cost of living is much lower, but pay levels found by graduates are not that much less than at Stevens, according to https://career.sa.ua.edu/employers/first-destination-reports/ .
Major Stevens Berkeley Alabama
Aerospace Eng 61987
Biomedical Eng 67200 76126
Chemical Eng 69150 68818 65178
Civil Eng 62000 80071 55173
Const Eng 60000
Computer Eng 75600<br>
Electrical Eng 68300 63511
El Eng Comp Sci 109078
Eng Science 79941
Eng Mgmt 65800<br>
Industrial Eng 78000
Mat Sci Eng 77317
Mechanical Eng 66700 74364 63379
Business & Tech 62600<br>
Mgmt Info Sys 64744
Finance 73800 56503
Business 77028<br>
Computer Sci 78200 107433 69000