<p>The highest ranked public school is the University of Virginia (#46) followed closely by the College of William and Mary (#49) and UCLA (#55).</p>
<p>Our annual ranking of the 650 best undergraduate institutions focuses on the things that matter the most to students: quality of teaching, great career prospects, graduation rates and low levels of debt. Unlike other lists, we pointedly ignore ephemeral measures such as school reputation and ill-conceived metrics that reward wasteful spending.</p>
<p>Williams College (#1), Princeton University (#2) which boasts nearly nonexistent student debt rates due to one of the most generous financial aid programs in the nation.</p>
<p>Outside of Princeton and Harvard (#6), Ivy League schools fare relatively poorly, suggesting that their reputations might be a bit overblown. Yale (#14), Brown (#21) and Dartmouth (#30) crack the top 5%, but the other Ivies Columbia (#42), Cornell (#51) University of Pennsylvania (#52) -- do not.</p>
<p>Because of our emphasis on financial prudence, the zero-cost military service academies rank highly.</p>
<p>One of the areas where UVa has pride is in its cost-efficiency. (That matter is also helped because UVa is located in a geographic area with a much lower cost of living than many other top universities). In any case, this Forbes study specifically does not rate a college higher because it spends more - unlike US News.</p>
<p>As much as I agree with you Charlie, OOS students are dropping nearly 50k a year (about the same as other top ivies etc). And if you don’t qualify for FA you are paying a pretty penny… I never fully understood FA. I didn’t get any even though my parents are putting 4 kids through college (close to 1 million spent on education). How can a college not even take that into account.</p>
<p>@ UVAorBust, They do somewhere in the mix. Perhaps not as much as you want, however there is a place to report on the FAFSA/Profile if you have other students you are paying tuition for and how much. If you simply have three siblings, however they are not all in school currently, that’s not a factor right now. Each year’s decision/award is only based on the financial data for that single year. When you are a third year if you have two siblings in school you may qualify (ie this is a change). I don’t know how much that effects the bottom line or your families finances. Your parents could certainly pose the question to financial aid.</p>
<p>The bottom line is Access UVa is a premier program that is used as a standard for other programs around the nation. It’s not perfect for every family by any means, but it does a darn good job for instate and OOS families at making an incredible university as affordable as possible for many students.</p>
<p>When talking about career prospects and alumni salaries, does Forbes account for the fact that most students attending the top private schools are already wealthy and have family contacts in high places that provide opportunities despite where the student went to school?</p>
<p>@2fresh4flow, That’s an interesting point, but I wouldn’t say most people graduating from those schools are that wealthy and connected. It may have been like that in the old days, but now, with the amount of financial aid many private universities have to offer, I think the playing field has been leveled enough that this socioeconomic background factor has become much less relevant.</p>
<p>UVaorbust: At many colleges, there are some complaints from families that spend much of their income on private primary and secondary education. Those costs are not considered in financial aid formulas because it is considered a luxury.</p>
<p>People do have to wonder why UVA can give out so much aid. A lot of people from my school (Virginia Beach area, basically Virginia’s middle class) aren’t getting aid because they’re pretty wealthy. I can only imagine the aid in the NOVA region. Maybe UVA can offer so much aid to SOME students because a lot of the students don’t need/get aid.</p>
<p>I know that UVA has all kinds of people, rich, poor, middle, but there definitely has to be more rich people at UVA than other high ranked publics (a couple of my teachers who went there said so). Don’t know how valid this is though.</p>
<p>It’s not hard for me to believe that UVa is better than Penn. I feel that many Ivies are overrated especially when rankings like US News use what Forbes calls “ephemeral measures such as school ‘reputation’ and ill-conceived metrics that reward wasteful spending.” </p>
<p>Here’s another case in point: [Business</a> Week’s Undergraduate Business School Rankings.](<a href=“Bloomberg - Are you a robot?”>Bloomberg - Are you a robot?) What is Penn really known for? It’s business school. Well, according to Business Week, McIntire is stronger than Wharton when you take into account Recruiter Rankings, MBA Feeder School rankings, etc. So, it’s not hard for me to believe that Forbes also thinks UVa is better.</p>
<p>US News and World Report does overplay the “reputation” factor in its rankings. However, 17.5% of the Forbes process for determining rank comes from student evaluations from ratemyprofessor. Listing of alumni in “Who’s Who in America” counts for 10%. Salary lists of alumni at payscale.com accounts for another 15%. While any system that tries to rank colleges will have flaws, I am going to stick with US News and World Report for the time being.</p>
<p>Well, who better to rate schools than the students who attend them? US News uses college presidents and deans to rank each other. How does a dean from USC (South Carolina) really know what’s going on at USC (Southern California)? </p>
<p>If a school claims to graduate stellar alums, then “Who’s Who” would list them.</p>
<p>The biggest difference between US News & Forbes is that US News looks at the stats of who’s admitted and includes college stats “that reward wasteful spending.” Forbes looks at the stats of the schools’ graduates and the ratings from the students themselves.</p>
<p>If I’m making an educational investment, show me the final product. Who is the school graduating? Do the students feel like they’re getting a good education? I’d want to know that I’m getting my money’s worth. In short, reality means more to me than reputation.</p>
<p>No formula or website or publication is perfect when it comes to distilling collegiate information, (and personally, I think rankings are just used to sell magazines and generate more clicks – the HuffPost has become an expert at ranking anything)…but I do think Forbes is on the right track when it comes to looking at criteria that better summarizes what’s truly important when it comes to picking a good college.</p>
<p>However…I think the biggest flaw in the Forbes ranking is clumping all the schools together. How can they compare military service academies, liberal arts colleges, large public universities, and private research universities? They’re so different from each other.</p>