Best college degree

COLLEGE | Want a quality education without the Ivy League price tag? Check out our 100 BEST BUYS in public colleges and universities.

A CAMPUS OF GIANT OAKS, brick sidewalks and 18th-century buildings. First-rate academic programs in everything from liberal arts and journalism to computer science and medicine. Cream-of-the-crop fellow students. Championship men's basketball and women's soccer. What more could you want in a college?

How about a tuition bill that won't wipe you out? For the second time, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill tops our list of best values among public colleges and universities, for its combination of top-quality academics and low cost.

Senior nursing major Leslie Collins says she "fell in love with Carolina" when she visited the campus as a finalist for the school's prestigious Morehead scholarship. She didn't win, but chose Chapel Hill anyway, turning down a $12,000 award from Wake Forest. "Carolina was half of what Wake Forest would have been, even with the scholarship," Collins says.

Even after a substantial increase this year, tuition and fees at Chapel Hill are just $2,768 in 2000-01. Add in room and board and the annual cost comes to $8,508--at least $20,000 less than the tab at most top private colleges. Even for out-of-state students, who pay about twice the price, Chapel Hill is still a bargain, at $17,674 this year.

Not surprisingly, top students from all over the country must elbow their way in. Last year Chapel Hill turned away 61% of its applicants, and 91% of those accepted were in the top 10% of their high school class. Students who make the cut are obviously pleased with the education they get: An impressive 94% of freshmen return for their sophomore year, and more than 80% stay to earn UNC diplomas.

Less important to students, perhaps, than to their parents, is the university's affordability. There are lots of ways to conquer the leviathan of paying for a college education: Save early and often; seek out scholarships; maximize your chances for financial aid. But the selection of a reasonably priced college is a key weapon that can help you educate your children without ruining your retirement. Thus, for the second time, we've identified the best values among public colleges and universities--schools where you can get a quality education for less than the cost of a second home (for our first ranking, see "State Universities to Cheer About," Sept. 1998).

Big and small. While there are some behemoths on our list, such as Texas A&M (number 23) with 36,082 undergraduates and the University of Florida (12) with 31,633, there are also ample options for students who don't want to be a face among the masses. In fact, almost one-fourth of our best-value schools have fewer than 6,000 undergrads.

And few colleges, public or private, could be as intimate as the New College of the University of South Florida, in Sarasota (4). With just over 600 undergraduates, this honors college is a find for ambitious students who want to chart their own course and work closely with faculty in small classes, doing independent study and hands-on research. The school has no required courses, no teaching assistants--and no grades. (Professors instead provide lengthy written evaluations.) Compared with private schools with similar philosophies, such as Reed College, in Oregon, and Hampshire College, in Massachusetts (both more than $30,000 a year), New College is a steal: This year, in-state students pay less than $7,500 for tuition, fees, and room and board; non-Floridians pay about $16,300.

There are great values on our list for students who want big-city excitement, small-town tranquility or the thrill of rooting for nationally ranked sports teams; who want to study humanities or physical sciences, business or fine arts, technology or engineering; and who want to be close to home or as far away as possible, nestled in the mountains or biking distance from the beach. So while no list of "bests" can pinpoint the school that will be just right for a student's goals and a parent's pocketbook, our top-100 list is a good place to start your search.

How we chose the best

WE DETERMINED the winners by using data that the schools themselves supply and applying our own formulas, slightly revised from two years ago. The first-, second- and third-place schools have not changed since then, and several more are repeated in the top ten. New to the top ten are the New College, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor (7) and the University of California at San Diego (10).

Most of our data comes from Wintergreen-Orchard House, which gathers statistics each year from more than 1,800 schools, including 589 four-year public colleges and universities. We supplemented Wintergreen's data with statistics from the U.S. Department of Education and our own phone calls and faxes to the colleges.

We eliminated non-U.S. schools and specialty schools that award degrees only in medical sciences or fine arts, for instance. Then we narrowed the list to the 175 colleges and universities that are the most selective, based on entrance-exam scores of the 1999 freshman class and on the percentage of applicants who are admitted.

Those schools, which attract strong students because of the high demand, qualified for tougher scrutiny. To narrow the list to the final 100, we looked at a variety of additional quality measures, including graduation rates, how many freshmen return for their sophomore year, student-faculty ratios, how much the college spends per student on instruction, and how much it spends to maintain library resources.

After the top 100 were selected on quality alone, they were ranked on a combination of quality and cost measures: total cost, percentage of financial need met for the average student with need, average cost for students with need after subtracting grants (but not loans), and average amount of debt a student accumulates before graduation. Overall, the formula placed greater weight on quality (71%) than on cost (29%) because "value" is not synonymous with "cheap."

For consistency, we used 1999-2000 cost figures for all schools in our analysis. We have since updated tuition and room and board to 2000-01 costs in the tables, so you can see what students are paying this fall. We broke ties in the rankings by giving the edge to colleges that charge out-of-state students less.

Details, details

TO TAKE ADVANTAGE of a great value, you first have to get in, and that's a challenge at some of our top ten. At Chapel Hill, U.Va. and Berkeley, for instance, fewer than 40% of applicants get good news. But most of our best values are within reach for good students: At three-fourths of the top 100 (and four in the top ten), the admission rate exceeds 60%.

When is graduation? If there's one area in which public colleges tend to lag private schools, it's in their ability to graduate students quickly. A fifth or even sixth year of college is not uncommon for public-college students, and an extra year or two of expenses will take the luster off a good value. For that reason, we gave strong consideration to four-year graduation rates in addition to six-year rates, which are a more popular statistic. On our list, U.Va. and William and Mary stand out for their high four-year graduation rates. The average among schools on our list is just 33% (compared with an average six-year graduation rate of 63%), which means that roughly half of those who graduate from one of our top-100 schools take longer than four years to do so.

How much out of pocket? Total costs at the schools in our top 100 range from a mere $5,668 to about $15,000 for state residents. The tab for out-of-state students runs from $10,266 (at the University of Mississippi, 42) to almost $26,000 (at the University of Michigan). Because costs are already low, most middle-income families qualify for little or no financial aid except loans. Thus, we gave the greatest weight in our formulas to raw costs.

But we did give extra credit to schools that are generous with need-based financial aid. Unlike most private schools, many publics do not meet a student's full financial need, so we considered the percentage of need each school does meet (about 80% is average). We also measured how much aid is in the form of grants rather than loans, and how much debt a typical student accrues. Colleges that stand out for generous aid include Chapel Hill, SUNY Binghamton (5) and the University of Washington (13).

WHAT THE TABLES TELL YOU

The data in our tables was supplied by Wintergreen-Orchard House and supplemented by our own reporting. The table does not show all the data we used to assess colleges. Enrollment is the number of full-time and part-time undergraduates enrolled during the 1999-2000 academic year.

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