Kiplinger's Best College Values, 2018

Data10
Sat, 10 Feb 2018 21:29:21 +0000

While such lists may be interesting to discuss, this type of “best value” ranking are near irrelevant for individuals because they do not consider individuals financial situations. For example, Princeton is ranked first in the list. One key factor in their ranking is most students at Princeton receive need based aid, and the average need based aid amount is nearly $50k. If you are receiving $50k of aid per year, then Princeton is a great value. If you are full pay, then a lower sticker price college is likely going to be a better value. Best value is highly dependent on an individual’s net price.

The ranking list seems highly dependent on graduation rate. Graduation rate is largely driven by the individual, not the college. HYPSM… primarily have a high graduation rate because they are admitting top students, not because the school is facilitating the graduation rate. If a particular student chooses to attend a safety instead of HYPSM… he’s going to have a high chance of graduation rate, like he would at HYPSM… His chance of graduation is not going to drop down to the low rate at the safety. Similarly if a kid who barely passes HS is somehow admitted to HYPSM, he’s not going to have a high chance of graduating on time, regardless of what the overall graduating rate is at the college. As mentioned in my earlier post, colleges that have lower graduation rates than expected based on stats of incoming students often have a good reason that most would consider a positive, such as encouraging students to pursue co-ops, or making it easy to do co-terminal master’s . I also question some of the listed stat numbers. For example, Stanford’s website suggests a median student debt of ~$7k, far less than the listed $20k.

In short, I’d recommend choosing colleges based on the criteria that is important to you, your individual financial situation, the strength of your desired program, … not because of an arbitrary ranking on some website.