Washington Monthly - September/October 2019 - 52

AMERICA'S BEST
BANG FOR THE
BUCK COLLEGES
Our one-of-a-kind list of schools that help
non-wealthy students attain marketable
degrees at affordable prices.
By Robert Kelchen

ver the last few years, we at the Washington Monthly have been thrilled to see growing public attention paid to colleges' roles in fostering upward social mobility among their students. Most notably, even
our friends at U.S. News & World Report, long purveyors
of a prestige-centric standard of excellence, have slowly
begun to introduce measurements of social mobility into
their rankings. Still, those metrics take a back seat to reputational surveys and how much money a college has. We
prefer to do things differently.
This is our eighth year of producing a ranking of
"best bang for the buck" colleges, which is laser focused
on showing which colleges do a good job promoting social mobility-and which don't. We made a few tweaks
to this year's lists. One was switching from the percentage of students receiving Pell Grants to the number of
Pell recipients who earned bachelor's degrees. We did this
to reward colleges that provide access to higher education to more of the low-income Americans who need it-
and to give a nudge to the selective institutions that do
a great job for the low-income students they admit, but
who should be making room for far more of them. Another change was to take a state's income distribution into
account in some of our measures to adjust for economic
factors beyond a college's control. (A college in a state
with lower poverty rates doesn't necessarily deserve to
be penalized relative to one in a high-poverty state.)
The rankings are broken down by region, beginning on
page 54. (We used the same data and methodology to
create the social mobility portion of the main rankings,
which begin on page 64; the methodology is explained on
page 105.)
52

September/October 2019

The best bang for the buck colleges across each of
the five regions are a mix of some of America's most elite
institutions and hidden gems that make up for a lack of
name recognition with strong student outcomes and a
commitment to upward mobility. In the Northeast, the
City University of New York's Baruch College and Bentley University in Massachusetts join Harvard and Yale
in the top four. Baruch has more than twice the share of
first-generation students as the other top colleges while
charging a net price of just $4,128-$9 less than superwealthy Harvard.
In the South and Midwest, Berea College and College of the Ozarks maintain their strangleholds on the
top spots thanks to their economic diversity, relatively strong graduation rates, and commitment to meeting
students' financial need. Texas public universities occupy six spots in the top twelve thanks to providing affordable degrees and successfully graduating large numbers of
Pell recipients.
In the Southeast, Georgetown and Washington
and Lee take the top two spots, reflecting the fact that
they serve their lower-income students exceptionally
well. But combined, they only graduated 279 Pell recipients last year-or less than one-fourth the number that
fourteenth-ranked Florida International University graduated. Georgia's Augusta University, where 41 percent of
students receive Pell Grants, is number three in the Southeast and a great option for students who want more socioeconomic diversity than is found at the top two schools.
Finally, in the West, the California State University
system continues to dominate. While Brigham Young and
Stanford top the list, twelve Cal State campuses appear

Washington Monthly - September/October 2019

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