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September 10, 2019

Dollars for scholars: Which CT colleges offer best value?

Image | Universal Pictures
By Michael C. Bingham

It’s that time of the year — the academic year, that is.

The Wall Street Journal/Times Higher Education Rankings for 2019 were released last week, followed closely on their heels by the U.S. News & World Report college rankings released Monday. Though a college education can never be perfectly objectified and the quality of various institutions of higher learning is endlessly debatable (is Stanford really “better” than Columbia?), the annual rankings are widely publicized, burnished and massaged by institutions of higher learning seeking a leg up on the competition.

In rankings such as these, Yale University routinely shares top-five honors with Harvard, MIT, Princeton and others of its ilk. In both the U.S. News and WSJ rankings, the Blue Mother was ranked No. 3 for 2019.

Other high-ranking Connecticut schools include Wesleyan (No. 43 WSJ/Times) and the state’s flagship public university, UConn (No. 105 WSJ/Times).

The rankings measure deliverables such as student outcomes, class sizes, per-pupil spending and on-time graduation rates. Other metrics attempt to assess value. The U.S. News rankings include median starting salaries for freshly minted grads. The WSJ/Times rankings include both average salary 10 years after entering college, and average student debt at graduation (gulp).

Moreover, as with so many commodities, the sticker price in higher education seldom reflects what consumers actually pay. Among private schools, richer schools such as, well, Yale (with an endowment pushing $30 billion) can afford to be generous with aid. The sticker price for tuition plus room and board for Yale College is $66,900. But the average matriculating 18-year-old pays just $18,053, according to the WSJ/Times calculus — a whopping $48,847 differential.

Wesleyan has an even higher sticker price (tuition plus room and board = $66,970), but with its billion-dollar-plus endowment can afford to be, if not quite as generous as Yale, still pretty generous. The net annual price tag to attend college in Middletown is $24,251, according to WSJ/Times — a spread of $42,719.

Other less well-endowed private colleges (which includes most of them) can’t afford such extravagant subsidies, so the spread between the sticker price and actual cost is far smaller. Both Quinnipiac ($60,970) and Fairfield U. ($61,445) have $60,000-plus sticker prices, but the actual average annual cost to attend is closer to $40,000 ($38,665 and $37,799 annually, respectively).

The calculus for four-year public universities is far different. Connecticut high-school grads pay roughly half the tuition of their out-of-state counterparts to attend UConn, Southern Connecticut State University and the other CSCU schools.

Of course, if you’re really smart, a whole world of higher education may be at your fingertips. About a decade ago UConn decided to offer “Presidential” academic scholarships to every valedictorian and salutatorian at every public high school in Connecticut — a full free ride to the smarties.

And it worked: Unless your family’s rich, it’s pretty hard to turn up your nose at $30,000 or so a year. Over a decade, according to UConn spokesperson Stephanie Reitz, the number of valedictorians and salutatorian matriculating at good ol’ State U. has doubled — from 87 to 176 this academic year.

Oh, but if you really want to “drop a dime” (almost literally) to attend college, you’ll have to go out of state. Consider tiny Berea (Ky.) College, where the average annual net cost (according to WSJ/Times) is a low low low $1,680.

In midtown Manhattan, they call that lunch.

 

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