"The U.S. News & World Best College Rankings contains some perplexing data.
If you were to only rely on the U.S. News & World Best College Rankings, you might get the sense that the colleges best at keeping students out of debt are also some of the most prestigious.
But the ability of these schools to graduate students with minimal debt loads comes with a caveat: they don’t enroll many poor students. Of the five colleges that U.S. News says graduates students with the least amount of student debt, three — Harvard, Princeton and Yale — enroll a relatively small share of students who are eligible for a Pell grant, the money the government provides low-income students to attend college, according to government data or figures provided by the school. At those schools the share of Pell-eligible students is less than 20%." …