The best universities in the United States for value for money

So-called elite universities have been under scrutiny for the past few years, and that has only intensified since campus protests at the start of the war between Israel and Hamas drew national attention. These institutions have been the subject of congressional hearings and constant media coverage, and are unlikely to escape public scrutiny in the near future.

But here in the MonthlyWe focus not exclusively on Columbia and Harvard universities, which serve a privileged few, but on the much broader group of universities where the vast majority of students are educated, and on how well they all promote social mobility. After all, universities receive hundreds of billions of dollars each year in federal, state, and local government subsidies, in addition to the tuition they charge. Therefore, students and taxpayers have a right to know how well these schools are fulfilling their mandate to make the American dream possible.

In that spirit, we present our annual list of the Best Colleges for Value in 2024: schools that do a good job of helping students of modest means earn reasonably priced degrees that help them get ahead economically in life. The rankings are broken down by region. (We used the same data and methodology to create the social mobility portion of the main rankings; the methodology is explained here.)

No American university has been criticized as much this year as Columbia for being too tough (or not tough enough) on Gaza protesters and too indecisive (or too doctrinaire) in defending free speech. But let me say something uncommon about the Morningside Heights institution: it does right by its non-rich students. Columbia undergraduates who come from families earning less than $75,000 a year pay just $3,061 a year to attend (including living expenses) and earn $89,697 in annual earnings nine years after entering college. Columbia ranks fourth in our ranking of the best value in the Northeast this year.

That said, Columbia does not provide services That many Low- and moderate-income students: Out of a graduating class of 2,200, only 432 receive Pell grants. By contrast, CUNY’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, number seven in our Northeast rankings, graduates 1,589 Pell students a year. Rutgers University-Newark, number 21, outpaces Yale and Dartmouth, 27 and 35, respectively. And while Columbia’s low cost for non-wealthy students and high incomes are admirable, at Massachusetts Maritime Academy, number five in our Northeast rankings, students face total expenses of $8,072 and earn more than $77,000 a year nine years later. Even with an endowment of just $40 million, Massachusetts Maritime Academy does not drop a heavy debt anchor on students.

Across all regions, some of America’s wealthiest and most selective universities perform admirably. MIT, Princeton, Vanderbilt, Georgetown, Stanford, and Northwestern all rank among the top 10 in their respective regions. But if anyone can provide affordable, high-quality education to students from low- and middle-income families, it’s them. Because of their vast endowments — the result of decades of recruiting students from wealthy families who then make a lot of money and then gratefully donate a portion to their alma maters while enjoying tax breaks — these elite schools can afford to be generous to the relatively few poor students they recruit.

Much more credit should go to the regionally focused public and private universities on this list that consistently manage to do more with less. The California State University system consistently stands out as a strong performer, with seven of the top nine universities and 13 of the top 20 in the West belonging to that system. Berea College and the University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley lead the way in the South, and the University of Florida Online and Florida International University are top performers in the Southeast. In the Midwest, Governors State University, Trine University, and College of the Ozarks are among the broadly accessible institutions that keep prices in check while generating strong results.

The universities that offer the best value for money in each region are a combination of a few nationally recognized and highly selective universities, and many others that are not so famous and cater to a broader range of students. The same applies to the worst Universities that offer excellent value for money, which you can check out on our website by scrolling to the bottom of the rankings. There, you’ll probably recognize the names of schools in your local community (regional public universities, small liberal arts colleges, for-profit institutions) that charge students more than they should, graduate fewer than they could, and offer degrees that aren’t worth much on the market.

But what should really bother us (and we certainly do) are schools that fail to serve low-income students despite having all the resources they need to serve them well. Tulane University, for example, has an endowment of more than $2 billion, the 68th largest in the country. Yet this year it ranks last in the South because of relatively low graduation rates, low post-college earnings, and a high net price tag. Other low-ranking universities with substantial financial resources include the University of Miami, High Point University, Creighton University, and the University of Tulsa.

As these examples show, having a well-known brand is no guarantee that a college is doing the right thing for low- and moderate-income students. In fact, colleges that are little known outside their local area—like the University of Houston-Downtown, Towson University, or Metropolitan State University in Minneapolis—are the ones that do the best job of getting the most people up the economic ladder. If you’re a prospective student from a family without a lot of money, we’re confident that any of the schools in the top third of our Best Value rankings would be a good place to invest your time and tuition money. And if you’re a concerned citizen or policymaker, we’d like to suggest that the colleges at the bottom of these rankings might not be the best places to spend our tax dollars.

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