MONEY RANKS THE BEST COLLEGES IN AMERICA FOR YOUR MONEY
New Analysis Finds Babson College in Massachusetts Is Best Value Education in The Country; Webb Institute, MIT, Princeton, and Stanford in Top 5. 

(Monday, July 28, 2014) – Today, Money reveals its list of Money’s Best Colleges, a new approach to ranking colleges that uses unique measures of educational quality, affordability, and career outcomes to help families find the right school at the right price.

Nine months in the making, Money’s Best Colleges ranks 665 schools on 17 measures, based on the most recent research about what really matters in higher education. Among its distinctive analyses: The list provides a more realistic way to price colleges, taking into account the complete cost of a degree rather than a single year. It is also the only ranking to evaluate which schools add the most value given the academic and economic background of the students who attend, and to level the playing field on majors, to show whether graduates of a particular college earn more (or less) than average, whether they got degrees in engineering or English. The result, says Money senior writer Kim Clark, who created the rankings and wrote the accompanying story, “is a list of colleges – some famous, some surprising – that, according to the best data available, provide real value. College is expensive, but the highly rated colleges on our list are the most likely to do a great job of educating your student and helping to launch him or her into a well-paying job.”

To develop the new rankings, Money partnered with Mark Schneider, former commissioner of the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics and his company College Measures, which collects and analyzes data to drive improvements in higher ed. Major contributions also came from Payscale.com, which provided the earnings data. One of the most important findings to come out of the rankings, Schneider notes, is that you don’t have to pay a lot to get a high quality education that really helps in the job market. “The published price of a college doesn’t tell you very much about what you’ll actually pay or of students’ later life success,” he says. “There is zero correlation with most of our measures.”

Money’s Top 10 Best Colleges: 
1. Babson College – Babson Park, Mass.
2. Webb Institute – Glen Cove, N.Y. 
3. Massachusetts Institute of Technology – Cambridge, Mass.
4. Princeton University – Princeton, N.J.
5. Stanford University – Stanford, Calif.
6. Harvard University – Cambridge, Mass.
7. Harvey Mudd College – Claremont, Calif.
8. Cooper Union – New York City, N.Y.
9. Brigham Young University – Provo – Provo, Utah
10. California Institute of Technology – Pasadena, Calif.