The
Best Value Colleges, 13th Edition (2020): 75 Schools That Give You
the Most for Your Money. By Robert
Franek, David Soto, Stephen Koch, and the Staff of The Princeton Review.
Princeton Review/Penguin Random House. $12.99.
Well, let’s see. The previous edition of The Princeton Review’s
always-valuable guide to ROI (return on investment) where college is concerned
was called the 2019 edition, not the 12th. The new one is called the
13th, not the 2020 version (although that is what it is). The
previous edition included 200 schools. The new one includes 75 – but an
additional 125 are discussed online, and it costs nothing (except time) to gain
access to the data on them. The prior edition was, typically for these books,
something of a giant: a weighty paperback that could be awkward to carry and
page through because of its sheer heft, but having an easy-to-use layout in
which each school profiled received two facing pages with shaded far-left and
far-right columns packed with data, and rest-of-page narratives on specific
topics. The new edition costs less ($12.99 vs. $22.99), is considerably
smaller, and is certainly easier to carry and thumb through, but now each
school’s information is spread across four pages, and the layout is choppier than
in the past and not as easy to use.
Year-over-year comparisons are largely irrelevant to families with
college-bound students, though, since there will likely be only one specific
year per student in which families need to consult books like this one. And the
only thing that will matter in that year is how helpful the book is. So the
good news, and it really is good, is that The
Best Value Colleges remains as useful, well-thought-out and impressively
data-driven as it has always been. Increasingly, attendance at college is seen as
primarily an economic decision: a college degree today, like a high-school
degree in the not-so-distant past, is a requirement for the sorts of jobs to
which a great many people aspire. Therefore, the notions of value and ROI have
now taken on even more importance than they used to have. The Princeton Review
tries to prevent its data from being solely
a measure of financial success by including metrics relating to graduates’
identification of “high job meaning (i.e., feeling that their job makes the
world a better place),” although this is necessarily a highly subjective
matter. Nevertheless, it makes sense for the book to provide students who are
so inclined with some information on schools they can attend where like-minded
“make the world a better place” individuals are more often to be found.
By and large, however, what The Best Value Colleges does is provide
financial data indicating the economic value of attending specific schools –
and how some schools’ value, under this definition, compares with the economic
value of attending different ones. The 75 schools in the book, or the 200
discussed when the online elements are included, are drawn from a group of 656
that already represent a small fraction of the 5,300 or so colleges and
universities in the United States. Whatever the value of inclusion of exclusion
– the book explains its methodology briefly – the fact is that any student who
wants to attend college can find one that will accept him or her. Whether the
post-graduation economic value of having attended schools not discussed in this
book will be comparable to the post-graduation economic value of attending ones
that are included is both unknowable and irrelevant: this book is for families
that want a big dose of economic reality, served in this particular style, and
that will therefore consider only the schools discussed here, at least as a
starting point.
Colleges in this book get to be listed in high
positions on the various lists based largely on the generosity of their
financial-aid packages. Princeton University (with which The Princeton Review
is not affiliated) tops the list of 75 because admitted students who qualify
for financial aid get 100% scholarship grants – not loans. Note that this is
for students who qualify for financial
aid. Yes, the school provides them with an average grant of more than
$51,000 for a single year of attendance, but how does a student qualify? Ah, that
is where things get tricky. The highest-ranked colleges here have a strong
focus on “need-blind admissions,”
designed to bring in the best students without regard to their wealth (although
often with regard to other factors,
ranging from alumni connections to skin color). The ability of children from
families of modest means (or even out-and-out poverty) to get a top-quality
college education is a major accomplishment for many of these schools and a
major strength of the higher-education system in the United States. But what
happens to families that scrimp and save diligently for 18 years after a child
is born, managing to scrape together enough money to pay for the child’s
college education at a modestly priced school, but not enough to afford one of
the absolute top-tier ones? Those families are the forgotten middle, because
they cannot pay retail prices for top schools but do not qualify – because of
income, assets or both – for the extremely generous grants and other subsidies
that the highest-ranking schools offer to people who have done a poor job, or
none at all, of saving for college. The situation is exacerbated by politicians
who increasingly often seek to buy votes by promising that highly indebted
students will get all they have borrowed forgiven, leaving students and
families that save and sacrifice and manage to pay back their obligations in
the “sucker” category.
The Best Value Colleges cannot
remake the U.S. sociopolitical system, of course. And its rankings are careful
to exclude matters relating to student loans,
as opposed to outright grants. In addition to the primary list of 75 best-value
colleges, there are six other lists here, each including 25 schools: best
alumni network; best entry to internships; best career placement; best
financial aid; best “for students with no demonstrated need,” which means those
who do not qualify for financial aid; and best “for making an impact” – the
most subjective of the lists, based on “student ratings and responses to our
survey questions covering community service opportunities at their school,
student government, sustainability efforts, and on-campus student engagement.”
It is important to remember that even this list may have significant value for
families in which a student has already expressed a strong interest in going
into nonprofit work, community activism or similar areas.
For the much larger group of students seeking an education that will be
a ticket to financial and material success, the various lists are an excellent
place to start: they make it easy to turn to the alphabetically arranged pages
for the various listed schools to explore them in greater depth. And the
school-focused pages may encourage “shopping around” for similar schools based
on the description of the pluses and minuses of each specific one (there are
very few minuses anywhere). The “Career Information from PayScale.com” that
appears in each school profile will be an immediate eye opener, showing not
only each school’s ROI rating but also just how much the median starting and
mid-career salaries of graduates tend to be. The final line of this particular
element of the book gives “degrees awarded in STEM subjects” – since those
fields (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) are the ones in
highest focus for so many students and families these days.
As with all books of lists, data and analysis, The Best Value Colleges is only a start, and should emphatically not be the basis for choosing a single
school. The best thing to do with it is to use the various lists and individual
descriptions of colleges to focus on a small number of schools that will
hopefully meet the soon-to-be-college-student’s goals and needs (financial and
otherwise). But before doing that, a family discussion of the word “value” is
in order – because this book defines it in a particular way (or set of ways),
and those may or may not be the same ones that individual students and families
use. Only when you know what “value” signifies to you can you try to find a
college match that will deliver value in a meaningful way.
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