Some ‘best value’ colleges have high price tags
By MARY BETH MARKLEIN February 7, 2012 4:52PM
Illinois’ ‘Best’
Four Illinois schools made the list of the 150 best college values by the Princeton Review. Listed is each average tuition:
Wheaton College, $28,960
University of Chicago, $41,853
Northwestern, $38,088
U of I, Urbana-Champaign, $11,104*
*In-state tuition
To read the full list, go to www.usatoday.com/news/education/best-value-colleges
Updated: February 8, 2012 10:45AM
The latest list of America’s “best value” colleges includes several with the highest sticker prices in the nation.Among the schools with large tuitions that are nonetheless considered top-value colleges are Williams and Swarthmore, according to
The Best Value Colleges 2012, the Princeton Review’s annual list of best-value schools. The list is considered a guide for prospective college applicants to seek out the best value for their money. “We’re very quick to say it can’t just be a low sticker price,” Best Value Colleges lead author Robert Franek says. “The commitment has to be much deeper than that.” The key issue is whether institutions can keep costs down while raising the quality of their education, says John Roush, president of Centre College in Danville, Ky., one of 150 schools listed in the guide. Centre’s comprehensive tuition is about $40,000 for a full-time undergraduate living on campus. That’s slightly below the national average reported by the non-profit College Board this year for private colleges. With need-based grants averaging $24,000, many families pay far less. In the national debate about college affordability, value has become a central theme. President Barack Obama brought it up in a speech last month. It came up in a Senate hearing last week. And it’s high on the agenda when higher education leaders gather. This year’s “Best Value Colleges” list which features 75 public and 75 private colleges, as drawn from data from 650 colleges and were selected based on academics, cost of attendance and average gift aid. The online database includes financial details for each college, such as the average need-based aid awarded, the average amount borrowed and the percentage of students who borrow. A companion book released Monday, Even so, the return on investment is on the minds of many, from debt-ridden unemployed recent graduates in the Occupy Wall Street movement to Obama, who is proposing that the federal government collect and publish information from colleges about the earnings potential and job prospects. That kind of data could benefit college-bound students and their families during their search for schools. In a survey by the Princeton Review last year of 4,000 parents of applicants, the largest share, 42 percent, said the biggest benefit of college is the potential for a “better job and higher income.” A record 85.9 percent of this year’s college freshmen said they’re going to college “to get a better job,” up from 84.7 percent last year and 70.3 percent a decade ago, according to an annual survey by UCLA’s Cooperate Institution Research Program. For years, the top-cited reason for going to college was “to learn more about things that interest me.” Mary Sue Coleman, president of the University of Michigan, a Best Value public college, says her school spends more than $300 million in undergraduate financial aid so students can focus on their studies rather than their pocketbook. “I worry that students select fields based on whether they think they’re going to have a lot of debt rather than what their passion is,” she says. Colleges “ought to be working to make that not true.”
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